| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hello friends,
I have been working on getting into a Pathfinder 2e game. Since my internet currently sucks I have been working on making characters and learning the rules until I can find work and get better internet.
I have been running into some troubles that I find HIGHLY discouraging. I have been trying to figure out how to make a good character and have come to the conclusion that the system is designed to make it impossible to make either a good or bad character. I feel very constrained, like I have training wheels that prevent me from failing. This also means that I can’t succeed as well. This make me feel like what is the point of making any choice for a character at all.
Looking into it further I keep reading things saying that teamwork is what is important in Pathfinder 2e. I find this idea difficult to believe. In my experience, one player/character usually has to carry the rest of the party a good 80% of the time. Relying on other players/characters will get the entire party killed. Most players/characters act independently of all the others in the party against the same enemy, but there is no coordination or planning, and very few player use abilities or spells to help their comrades unless the spell/ability they were using on themselves had additional targets beyond just themselves. I have a hard time seeing this work in game.
This keeps bringing me back to the same conclusion. What is the point of making a character and playing if your character can be replaced with any other character or at least any other character that fills the same roll with no difference.
So can any of you tell me what I am missing, or shed some light on this conclusion. I for obvious reasons can’t spend any money with WoTC. And Fantasy RPGs are my passion.
Sounds like this is a group issue, instead of a game issue.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've seen it several times, almost always in online games.So it is not considered rude to ask about the other characters skills and abilities? I have found that in the past asking about another character is like asking to see someone naked. Done very delicately.I’ve been doing tabletop for 15 years now and never once seen this behavior. Many groups do a “session 0” explicitly about creating their characters together, so that they fit together nicely in both mechanics and narrative....why? What is there to hide or keep private?
My group exclusively plays online, and our character sheets have always been in a shared, public space for all of us to quickly reference.
Typically to keep any side stuff you're doing with the gm quiet, be it secret backstory stuff, downtime shenanigans, that sort of thing. The idea being that players can share what they want about their characters and save the rest for story drama, to prevent metagaming, purposeful or unconcious, or to encourage IC discussion of whatever it is you have going on. Typically entire groups buy into this sort of thing though or just accept it if the gm sets it up that way.
That or to prevent people trolling each other when you've got a bunch of people you know nothing about and just keep everything locked up until they've been vetted.
It's not really a big deal or anything, but I've seen and heard about it both in person and online so I'm more surprised at others' surprise that it happens.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I suppose I'm struggling to understand why building a party that works well together should be discouraged, especially when we're talking about a ruleset that demands some degree of synergy and teamwork. It's not ruining any kind of surprise if someone can see my build or knows my Reflex save.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I suppose I'm struggling to understand why building a party that works well together should be discouraged, especially when we're talking about a ruleset that demands some degree of synergy and teamwork. It's not ruining any kind of surprise if someone can see my build or knows my Reflex save.
It shouldn't be all that surprising, especially with many people coming from pf1 and 5e. In those systems, there's no particular pressure to be anything other than what you want to be, aside from not falling into traps or hitting certain optimization levels. At the very least, nothing about the system is pressuring you out of the kind of character you want to play, though the mechanics might need massaging.
In this system, well, you don't want to show up and be whoops all casters at level 1, have too many duplicate skills, not have a medicine slave, etc. There's an inherent pressure to construct a group that checks off a bunch of boxes and that means playing what the system wants/needs you to play rather than what you want to play.
Now, I don't mind that much, but a lot of people do. The very idea that you need to even partially metagame a party comp for anything more difficult than PFS and that they might need to put whatever they were hoping to play aside because they showed up last at the table can send people up a wall.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude. Now I’ve railed against RPGs being a team-game* in the past, but I realise that PF2 is built for it, and I’m definitely up for it. What I want to do however is turn up with what I want to play, and everyone else does too, whatever that may be and then we work out how to synergise with what we have. It actually becomes way more interesting to me to find obscure and unlooked for, heretofore unknown synergies and tactics/strategies.
* this doesn’t mean characters are played to work actively against each other, just not a “team sport”
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Having said all that, I’m really enjoying this discussion and all of the advice (and HMM’s help to Ramlatus) so maybe we should move “teamwork building in Session 0” conversations elsewhere…
I don't think there's much to share for a party to work properly. Classes, combat styles (archer, melee, healing, buff), a few important skills and abilities (mostly how to cover out of combat healing) and main attributes (if they are not obvious from class choices) and you're set.
There's absolutely no need to share the entire character sheet to build a coordinated party. I'm also used to what Ramlatus is describing, but in my opinion it's not a problem in itself.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I suppose I'm struggling to understand why building a party that works well together should be discouraged, especially when we're talking about a ruleset that demands some degree of synergy and teamwork. It's not ruining any kind of surprise if someone can see my build or knows my Reflex save.
Some people play these games competitively and like to always be the top dog or near the top dog. If they can get super secret squirrel benefits, it makes them feel even better.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Personally, this makes more sense to me. The characters stay together because their odds of survival are higher with that synergy. Characters that don't compliment each other wouldn't adventure together for long.Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude.
There's a reason everybody in the Ocean's 11 heist crew has a different skill set. Adventuring's the same way!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Now, I don't mind that much, but a lot of people do. The very idea that you need to even partially metagame a party comp for anything more difficult than PFS and that they might need to put whatever they were hoping to play aside because they showed up last at the table can send people up a wall.
This isn't even a metagaming issue, though. Adventurers are all aware that they can't do it all alone, forming a group that have different strengths, since not everyone can know and do everything, is the smart idea.
Hell, not even the OP characters that can break encounters on the systems mentioned by OP can do everything. Worse, the moment these characters encounter situations they are not ready for they're done. All we see is players crying about unfair GMs or being picked on.
OP's issue boils down to a single and, in my opinion, very stupid thing: They want to try a new system, but don't actually want to try a new system that require them to adapt. They want their illusion of system and RPG mastery to be true regardless of the system, so they reject the very idea of adapting and create excuses for that.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
There's a reason everybody in the Ocean's 11 heist crew has a different skill set. Adventuring's the same way!Personally, this makes more sense to me. The characters stay together because their odds of survival are higher with that synergy. Characters that don't compliment each other wouldn't adventure together for long.Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude.
Sure, characters who neither compliment nor complement each other won’t last long. But that is a very different thing to how they start. And it doesn’t make any sense to me that every group just happens to be perfectly matched. It’s a little forced for my taste.
And as for Ocean’s Eleven, the analogy doesn’t work for me at all for two reasons: firstly not every adventuring party is gathered in such a way, nor is every adventure made up of firstly putting the band together and then the next part watching as the ultimate experts don’t significantly put a foot wrong while montaging to funky music. Adventuring isn’t like that, always.
Ultimately we have here a tension based on playstyle and preference. I see the reason why people do Session 0, and in certain ways. It isn’t something I look for nor particularly enjoy, but I defend unto 0 HP people’s right to do it that way!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That or to prevent people trolling each other when you've got a bunch of people you know nothing about and just keep everything locked up until they've been vetted.
This is certainly part of it.
I once had someone "hack" my character sheet in a VTT so that instead of firing poisoned bullets, my gunslinger was firing "dildo bullets." Completely killed an entire gaming session as no one could focus after that.
Though humorous, since then, that group has kept the character sheets pretty tightly controlled.
In another (in-person) group, someone was actually caught rewriting someone else's ability scores because they were convinced that they had chosen an inferior array. "I was only trying to help the party" was their only explanation. As the victim was new to the hobby, we lost a really bright potential new player that day. "Who the f--- does that?" was one of the last things I remember her saying.
Since that night w'vee only shared bios, not stat blocks, at that table.
In all my other groups (most of which are online) there is about a 50/50 chance whether the GM will have the character sheets locked or unlocked. They rarely discuss it with the group in my experience. GMs who lock sheets almost never unlock them even when I ask. I've been in plenty of game sessions where I couldn't even tell you what class people were playing because they don't announce their class, because they're roleplaying descriptions are vague, and because I can't see their sheet.
Contributor
|
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
In another (in-person) group, someone was actually caught rewriting someone else's ability scores because they were convinced that they had chosen an inferior array. "I was only trying to help the party" was their only explanation. As the victim was new to the hobby, we lost a really bright potential new player that day. "Who the f--- does that?" was one of the last things I remember her saying.
One thing female (and some non-binary/gender fluid) gamers hate is having other players or GMs assume that we have no idea how to make or play our own characters. Even worse, having another player trying to take your agency away by trying to bulldoze your creation with their own ideas. 'Mansplaining' is not just a joke -- it's something that happens all to often to us.
Remember the scene in the Gamers: Dorkness Rising when Joana's ex tries to replace her character with 'bikinimail babe?' It's funny, but it's also serves as a dark mirror to the reality that many of us face before we 'prove' ourselves at the gaming table.
I was really fortunate with my early experiences in Organized Play. I got a rep early as someone who knows what she is doing, so I got relatively little of this jerkish behavior. Also, I'm older, and can totally evoke a frosty school marm persona when I need to do so in order to quell such nonsense. But I get stories sometimes from female VOs, game designers, GMs, and others that some of their fellow players try to rewrite their characters or tell them how to play all the time.
Gentle reader, I am telling you this not to make you feel bad for whatever gender you bring to the table, but to help all of you think about how you interact with new players.
Rant done. Let's go back to Open Sheets, shall we?
I love open sheets. I come from play-by-post land where open character sheets are the norm. You can't edit another player's sheet, but you certainly can see it, and I love that way to play. It helps me see how others build their characters and it sparks new ideas for me.
Hmm
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude. ...
Half the Paizo adventure paths I have played throw the PCs together by circumstance.
In Rise of the Runelords the PCs are at the annual Swallowtail Butterfly Festival in Sandpoint when goblins raid. These strangers team up to fight the goblins. In my game, a rogue instead spent the time robbing the cashboxes of the festival booths and then rushed to join the heroes after the raid and said, "I'm with them."
In Jade Regent a local innkeeper recruits some adventurers to stop goblin raids on caravans. Thus, this party could be planned with every niche covered. But in my game, players brought who they wanted to play.
In the Serpent's Skull a shipwreck leaves the PCs stranded together on a savage island.
In Iron Gods the town of Torch offers a reward to any adventuring team that can rescue their lost wizard. Thus, it favors a planned team. In my game, Iron Gods among Scientists, the players made the characters they wanted and made a story why they were together. The dwarf gunsmith worked for the wizard, the half-elf magus regularly took jobs from the wizard, and the strix skald had met the magus on the road as he returned to Torch from a field trip. The three players soon realized that they needed some muscle, so I suggested that they could recruit an NPC, such as a caravan guard. Instead, they recruited the wizard's daughter on the explanation that she deserved a chance to search for her father. I built her as a bloodrager so that she could serve as the muscle.
In Ironfang Invasion the PCs are visiting the local village Phaendar for Market Day when hobgoblins invade. They escape across the river to the Fangwood Forst and spend most of the first module protecting other refugees while hiding in the forest. Thus, they are thrown together randomly. In my game, the PCs were forewarned in Session Zero about the plot. They created characters good at forest survival: ranger, druid, and rogues. And we had two rogues, an overlap that was resolved by one rogue multiclassing at 2nd level as the player intended all along. I altered the module a little and had the town leaders deliberately assign the PCs to lead the elderly and children to the forest, since they were good in the forest and since none owned homes in the village so should not die to defend the village.
My parties have all been thrown together at player's whims and they learned to work as a team. The Ironfang Invasion campaign I converted to PF2 rules, and we had a few gaps in the random selection of PCs. The ranger was the only PC trained in all martial weapons, so most looted weapons were useless to the other PCs. The champion joined the party at 3rd level and already had the weapons she wanted, but she had Magical Crafting that let her transfer runes to the rogues' weapons. The characters have no primary divine spellcaster (the druid multiclassed to cleric but barely studied divine spells) so when the fifth module Prisoners of the Blight required Remove Curse with no feasible alternative to cure darkblight, I gave them a Wand of Remove Curse as a gift from friends. Nevertheless, overall they could handle all problems with the classes and skills that they wanted to play.
We did not breaks the verisimilitude to pre-construct the perfect team. Random strangers are capable of teamwork through roleplaying that they learn to work together.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Gentle reader, I am telling you this not to make you feel bad for whatever gender you bring to the table, but to help all of you think about how you interact with new players.
I'm NOT disagreeing with you but I'd like to put in a "But sometimes ..."
But sometimes new players DO want advice and help. They really really do appreciate somebody pointing out that their stat array could be improved, that their build would be mechanically better if they were a fighter rather than a ranger, etc.
The trick (IMO) is to
1) Try hard to offer advice to those who WANT it (I explicitly ask if the person wants advice and tell them to tell me to back off if I'm giving more than they want)
2) To offer ADVICE (together with reasoning) and NOT just to tell them what to do. There is a huge difference between "Well, you could raise your STR to 18 and lower another stat to 10 and it will help you in combat" and "Your STR HAS to be 18 for you to be effective"
Both of the above are impossible to do perfectly, ESPECIALLY online when so much of the visual cues as to a persons reaction aren't present. But I think it is as important to offer advice to people who want it as it is to NOT offer advice/take control when people don't want it. It is worth trying to walk that line.
Note - I'm NOT addressing gender specifically. The problem exists with all genders although it can definitely be worse with a male explaining things to a female.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do totally understand the idea that most tabletop gamers will not work as a team right away. It takes time to develop dynamics and most groups die before that happens. I do agree most players will just play solo and contribute to the whole by just being awesome themselves. In my games, teamwork doesn't happen often but It also hasn't destroyed our gaming experience. The group does minor things to help each other and I will usually remind them to buff each other. I don't think more than that really needs to be going on.
I also always let all the players see sheets openly, but my group doesn't really take advantage of that most of the time.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I suppose I'm struggling to understand why building a party that works well together should be discouraged, especially when we're talking about a ruleset that demands some degree of synergy and teamwork. It's not ruining any kind of surprise if someone can see my build or knows my Reflex save.
Pretty much that.
There are things about my characters that I do keep secret to reveal at an appropriate and entertaining time in the game itself.
I don't put such things on my character sheets because they aren't part of my character stats.
I don't think that having Nimble Dodge or not being Trained in Medicine is something that I should be keeping secret from the other players.
I'll be honest most games I setup, people love building characters and they arrive with them already done. About the only thing they share is class and we don't get any duplicates.
The players and characters DONT work well together initially. No verisimilitude breaking there. But you bet after a battle that almost kills one or more of them happens, they start talking about what they could do better while they stitch the rogues arm back on. This doesn't break verisimilitude either, the characters have taken on a life threatening job, and have been shown that not working together means you might die. It's basically how every arc for "superheroes don't work well as a team at the start of the movie, oops get their bottom slapped, work well together for final half" that is a common trope for good reason.
Yeah, that's my experience if we are talking about newer players. I think vets may be aware of the advantage of collective building, but all you really need is someone with out of combat healing.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude. Now I’ve railed against RPGs being a team-game* in the past, but I realise that PF2 is built for it, and I’m definitely up for it. What I want to do however is turn up with what I want to play, and everyone else does too, whatever that may be and then we work out how to synergise with what we have. It actually becomes way more interesting to me to find obscure and unlooked for, heretofore unknown synergies and tactics/strategies.
* this doesn’t mean characters are played to work actively against each other, just not a “team sport”
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.
And I can at least ignore micro transactions
So you the rest of the topic.
Party dying because everyone wanted to be a melee d8 hit dice martial with redundant synergies and huge gaps isn't fun to me. I'm not sure why you think it would be fun.
I never put my important story information on my character sheet, I put it on a piece of paper or in a separate app on my phone.
And if new players are frustrated, it should be common practice to go over your character sheet and see if anything is not in place where it should be.
I'm in one online game and the new player never played 2e and his character sheet was wrong in a lot of places resulting in extremely low AC and HP for their level.
We helped them out and answered any questions they had.
Because being nice and helpful shouldn't be difficult. You just ask first and if they refuse you leave them to their devices.
The pitfall that PF2 is designed to avoid is "I want to make a character who can do X, so I pick feats relevant to doing X" where you end up with a bad character because "actually doing X well" requires a high degree of system mastery most likely because the thing you want to do requires long feat chains intended to gate out classes without bonus feats.
Now in PF2 you can still make a bad character by choosing to emphasize things that are not relevant to the campaign (e.g. investing heavily in mounted combat in a campaign that takes place chiefly in libraries). You could also make bad choices RE stats, but this requires mastery of the system in order to know what you need to do and avoid doing it (like making a poppet precision ranger with crossbow feats and 8 Dex).
So for the most part you become "good enough" at something by having good proficiency in that thing, having some of the stat that is relevant to the thing, and picking feats that are relevant to doing the thing. What you can't do is become *so good* at something that you just overwhelm the challenge with Math. A serious problem in the previous edition was that you can't design a high level skills challenge that a generalist could pass that a specialist could not autopass, or a skill challenge that a specialist might fail and a generalist might succeed at. Part of the solution is to make it so you can only specialize in certain things- if you're an archer ranger, only about half of your class feats apply to archery and none of your general, skill, and ancestry feats probably do.
The thing about "teamwork making the dream work" is because many of the fixes in this edition are based on keeping the modifiers within certain ranges, and being able to give a +2 or a +1 to what your buddy is trying to do is actually a really useful thing to do with an action. If your group is unfamiliar with how to play this way, I've found it's not actually very difficult to teach- the game kind of teaches it to you naturally since your third attack is at -10 but you could instead give a -2 (or more) to the person trying to hit you, or a +1/+2 to your ally. A lot of how this works is not done so much at the character building stage, but in the tactical stage- for example flanking is useful and just takes an action.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude. Now I’ve railed against RPGs being a team-game* in the past, but I realise that PF2 is built for it, and I’m definitely up for it. What I want to do however is turn up with what I want to play, and everyone else does too, whatever that may be and then we work out how to synergise with what we have. It actually becomes way more interesting to me to find obscure and unlooked for, heretofore unknown synergies and tactics/strategies.
* this doesn’t mean characters are played to work actively against each other, just not a “team sport”
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.
And I can at least ignore micro transactions
Ouch! Heh, I get it. [Puts on most am-dram stentorian tone]. “Ahem. [clears throat] How deah yoo breng mai twee elf-gaym unto desrahpyoot! Choose yoah wepin sah, duel et dawhn! On mai honna!”
So I guess there are only so many conceits I can bear. Like I said, it’s a playstyle and preference thing. And I can see, that at a remove one can accept, the planned-for-synergy party is great fun!
In my experience, one player/character usually has to carry the rest of the party a good 80% of the time. ...You need new experience then.
That mindset is exactly the type of thing that causes threads like this and this and this.
"I wonder if one of those is mine..."
*clicks first link*
"AYYYYY called it!"
I want to tell a teamwork story here about my party fighting against gugs in Siege of Stone and I remembered that I had written it down right after it happened. So I searched for it. I had written it in Sandal Fury's thread at comment #241.
I realize that all the points I want to illustrate here are covered in that other discussion, so let me avoid repeating myself.
Also in that thread Sandal Fury had said in comment #81:
So from what I'm reading and my somewhat limited experience, when people describe 2e as tactical, it's not in the sense of "tactics and strategy will improve your odds of success," but more "if you don't employ in-depth strategy with your team, you will fail."
I... *really* do not like that. One thing I've grown to detest in 1e was when a player's turn would start, and the whole party would start strategizing out of character, telling who to go where and target which with what so they could optimize their own turn and the party would be most efficient. "The Quarterback," for those familiar with the trope/webcomic. This could happen, and it was admittedly effective, but it was almost never necessary. In 1e, you could just wing it most of the time. If your buddy happened to be flanking, cool. It feels like Paizo took some common player habits (some of them bad) and baked them into the system.
Also, in the way it's presented, Recall Knowledge feels less like identifying monsters in 1e and more like mechanically incentivized metagaming. IMO.
I know this sounds weird, but I'm sure someone will get what I mean when I say this system feels "too much like a game."
Nine months have passed since that that comment on May 9, 2022. I am curious, Sandal Fury. Do you still have that problem with Pathfinder 2nd Edition?
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
It might not be a good fitting system for OP. It's my favorite one and addressed a lot of problems I've had elsewhere in ttrpgs but it's certainly not a one size fits all rule set.
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.And I can at least ignore micro transactions
Then why would you play Pathfinder 2e? Most of the design decisions in it are there to enhance versimilitude.
Re: Collaboration - Unless we wound up picking the same class, I'm not changing a thing about my character for the sake of the group. If you say "Oh hey, I see we're nearing level (x), you should really take (Y)", I'm going to ignore you. If Steed Ally is super important to my Paladin character concept, I'm taking it at level 4, even if we're knee deep in an underground labyrinth. Tough noogies.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Then why would you play Pathfinder 2e? Most of the design decisions in it are there to enhance versimilitude.
That's a rather rare opinion I've found. There are a ton of things in this edition that so throughly shatter the idea of it that I'm honestly curious as to what you see in it that enhances it.
I approach it like a JRPG or MMO myself, ignoring the inherent breaks between the setting flavor/history, player mechanics and non-player mechanics and focusing on playing the way the game wants me to and optimizing within that role.
As far as I know most people who play it do so because they appreciate the overall balance, because it's less involved than pf1 but more complex than 5e (in several senses) and because it's easy on the gm side.
What I want to do however is turn up with what I want to play, and everyone else does too, whatever that may be and then we work out how to synergise with what we have.
I mean generally speaking I think you can do that. Some teams will perform better than others, but that's fine. Some combinations might seem bad, but I feel like it's not until you get until some very specific and very heavily overlapping compositions that you start to run into significant issues. Campaign difficulty and tone pending.
The biggest area where I see session 0 and preplanning matter are to make sure no one is outshining each other too badly (it can feel bad when you build your character to do a thing and then someone else just completely outclasses you, especially if it's a non-redundant feature), or making sure the team has at least some of the skills the adventure expects of them.
That can sound a little meta-gamey if you worry about versimilitude, but at the same time it can feel pretty bad when it turns out there's one skill that's really important for an area and nobody has it, or when someone builds a character for a specific purpose and they don't actually get to do their thing ever because the campaign doesn't make room for it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
D&D has never had great verisimilitude. I never worried about much about. It's high fantasy role-playing. I focus on narration of what occurs in a fantastical manner and less on an idea of verisimilitude or realism. I know they made some attempts at realism, but it was never important in D&D.
If I wanted a more realistic game, I'd play GURPS. They definitely work very hard to incorporate verisimilitude into the game if you want it.
PF and D&D are high fantasy heroics. You can lower it to a Lord of the Rings, but it mostly plays like high fantasy anime or a video game at this point. It used to be toned down some, but it's always been pretty high fantasy with magic and class abilities.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.And I can at least ignore micro transactions
Then why would you play Pathfinder 2e? Most of the design decisions in it are there to enhance versimilitude.
Re: Collaboration - Unless we wound up picking the same class, I'm not changing a thing about my character for the sake of the group. If you say "Oh hey, I see we're nearing level (x), you should really take (Y)", I'm going to ignore you. If Steed Ally is super important to my Paladin character concept, I'm taking it at level 4, even if we're knee deep in an underground labyrinth. Tough noogies.
Guess I do not see it that way
Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude. Now I’ve railed against RPGs being a team-game* in the past, but I realise that PF2 is built for it, and I’m definitely up for it. What I want to do however is turn up with what I want to play, and everyone else does too, whatever that may be and then we work out how to synergise with what we have. It actually becomes way more interesting to me to find obscure and unlooked for, heretofore unknown synergies and tactics/strategies.
* this doesn’t mean characters are played to work actively against each other, just not a “team sport”
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.
And I can at least ignore micro transactions
Ouch! Heh, I get it. [Puts on most am-dram stentorian tone]. “Ahem. [clears throat] How deah yoo breng mai twee elf-gaym unto desrahpyoot! Choose yoah wepin sah, duel et dawhn! On mai honna!”
So I guess there are only so many conceits I can bear. Like I said, it’s a playstyle and preference thing. And I can see, that at a remove one can accept, the planned-for-synergy party is great fun!
Lol, I agree, and playstyle and preference is fine. I like that this games mechanics at supported by story.
I just draw the line at me inhibiting my and my tables fun for my own "verisimilitude" .
I just consider our synergy and teamwork an abstract and not something to waste my time with over analyzing.
Verisimilitude is one of the worst things to come to gaming up until micro transactions.And I can at least ignore micro transactions
Then why would you play Pathfinder 2e? Most of the design decisions in it are there to enhance versimilitude.
Re: Collaboration - Unless we wound up picking the same class, I'm not changing a thing about my character for the sake of the group. If you say "Oh hey, I see we're nearing level (x), you should really take (Y)", I'm going to ignore you. If Steed Ally is super important to my Paladin character concept, I'm taking it at level 4, even if we're knee deep in an underground labyrinth. Tough noogies.
Maybe this is a sentiment shared by people who play with strangers a lot.
I have one online game where I play after strangers. I picked up battle medicine to help, I did not feel it was infringing upon my agency or character identity to do so.
And I feel kind you'd have a terrible time if you couldn't use a main feature of your character simply because you are stubborn. What's the benefit of your mount if it can't go with due to being in caves with lots of climbing?
Do you expect the DM to just adapt to your character choices like this?
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
What's the benefit of your mount if it can't go with due to being in caves with lots of climbing?
Do you expect the DM to just adapt to your character choices like this?
I play a champion with Steed Ally in Agents of Edgewatch. Sort of like those mounted cops you sometimes see in real life cities.
The campaign's encounters frequently involve indoor raids; investigations in the sewers, backalleys, aand other dark places of the city; basically small, often indoor spaces.I just use scrolls and a wand of pet cache. Works great. I don't have to worry about getting him into tight spaces as much, and I can single-action summon him for some quick shock-and-awe action in places where people wouldn't normally expect cavalry.
No DM adaption needed, other than roleplaying the NPCs' surprise.
Collaboration - Unless we wound up picking the same class, I'm not changing a thing about my character for the sake of the group. If you say "Oh hey, I see we're nearing level (x), you should really take (Y)", I'm going to ignore you. If Steed Ally is super important to my Paladin character concept, I'm taking it at level 4, even if we're knee deep in an underground labyrinth. Tough noogies.Maybe this is a sentiment shared by people who play with strangers a lot.
I have one online game where I play after strangers. I picked up battle medicine to help, I did not feel it was infringing upon my agency or character identity to do so.
And I feel kind you'd have a terrible time if you couldn't use a main feature of your character simply because you are stubborn. What's the benefit of your mount if it can't go with due to being in caves with lots of climbing?
Do you expect the DM to just adapt to your character choices like this?
I view the GM as a member of the players' team though not the PC's team. And I am the GM. I adapt to character choices whenever adaption might lead to more fun.
The stormborn druid Stormdancer in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign has a roc animal companion. Some Ironfang rangers had Medium roc animal companions and I decided to grow the companions Large and give them one-turn flight like a strix PC's Fledgling Flight while carrying a person so that they could do a classic carry-and-drop. I should have remembered that my players often copy whatever the NPCs can do, because after the battle Stormdancer talked to the orphaned roc companion and adopted Roxie as a pet. Later in leveling up to 10th level the druid picked up Order Explorer for Animal Order to make the roc her own companion.
I also gave Stormdancer a variant on her stormwind flight order spell for casting on Roxie that would let her carry a rider for 10 minutes, just long enough for Stormdancer to regain the focus point. The party was regularly traveling by conjured Phantom Steed, and I like some party members having their own mounts instead. Stormdancer likes Roxie as her mount rather than as a combat companion, though Roxie's speed does let Stormdancer fly higher when raining Fireballs from above on enemy armies.
Two levels after that, the party went into the Darklands' underground passages during Siege of Stone. What to do with a Large roc companion when half the tunnels would crowd her? I said that the druid learned a ritual that would let her transform Roxie into a Cave Pterosaur for that part of the adventure. Roxie served no useful role in that part of the adventure, but Stormdancer preferred to not leaving her companion behind. I suppose I could have pointed out Pet Cache, but I had hoped that the player could have found some use for Roxie as a cave pterosaur.
Mostly, the GM working with the players is about not being a spoilsport. I let the players control the narrative. For example, the following module, Prisoners of the Blight, began with them still in Kraggodan to the south talking to the dwarven archivist. His guidance sent them 70 miles north to the Blight in Fangwood. The module treated that as a time skip. My players instead wanted to roleplay the trip north, fighting against the Ironfang Legion as they passed through their territory. So I provided that side adventure.
What's the benefit of your mount if it can't go with due to being in caves with lots of climbing?
Do you expect the DM to just adapt to your character choices like this?
I play a champion with Steed Ally in Agents of Edgewatch. Sort of like those mounted cops you sometimes see in real life cities.
The campaign's encounters frequently involve indoor raids; investigations in the sewers, backalleys, aand other dark places of the city; basically small, often indoor spaces.I just use scrolls and a wand of pet cache. Works great. I don't have to worry about getting him into tight spaces as much, and I can single-action summon him for some quick shock-and-awe action in places where people wouldn't normally expect cavalry.
No DM adaption needed, other than roleplaying the NPCs' surprise.
And that's great (honestly I thought pet cache was only for familiar's so thank you for pointing it out)
But that also means as I as a GM would look to point out these work arounds rather than upend the campaign because horses can't climb so I shouldn't have a cave
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I mean one of the things about "I chose to build a mounted character, and we've been on a ship for the last four sessions" is that in PF2 the retraining rules are incredibly generous. If you find out what you planned to do doesn't work with what's happening in the story, you can basically rebuild your entire character during some downtime.
I hate the "you can just retrain" because it straight up ignores how long it actually takes to do any of that
Retraining is not a silver bullet of "you can just change whatever you want" that some people treat it as.
I would agree with that in principle. And especially for players who use retraining as part of their normal character development process.
Where that breaks down is if players build a character with certain expectations (probably unstated expectations) and then the game turns out differently than they imagined and their character is just straight up bad as a result.
The best example that I can think of is someone who was mentioning that they created a Barbarian for a campaign that then ended up with a heavy theme of mounted combat. Rage + Command an Animal don't mix.
At that point, a retraining for free to something thematically similar that does work in the campaign would probably be a good choice. Having the Barbarian become a Ranger or Fighter would be appropriate - even though it thoroughly violates all of the Retraining rules.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've seen it several times, almost always in online games.So it is not considered rude to ask about the other characters skills and abilities? I have found that in the past asking about another character is like asking to see someone naked. Done very delicately.I’ve been doing tabletop for 15 years now and never once seen this behavior. Many groups do a “session 0” explicitly about creating their characters together, so that they fit together nicely in both mechanics and narrative....why? What is there to hide or keep private?
My group exclusively plays online, and our character sheets have always been in a shared, public space for all of us to quickly reference.
This is 100% a group issue since I know very well some players and GMs like to keep character sheets secret.
As for what is there to hide: Character alignment, backstory stuff, abilities you would like to keep secret until relevant, items you would like to keep secret until relevant, etc.
The only reasons I can think of for sharing character sheet are to treat the game like a CRPG where character building is a collective "what is best for the party" (which I think is bad) or if a player is missing and the GM doesn't want extra work.
I guess the group I've played with trusts each other to not use meta knowledge against other players. In my group, in one character start behaving adversarially towards the others, the GM is going to talk to the player and figure out what the deal is because your on a fast track to being kicked out. Not that keeping those things secret is always adversarial, but usually the reason one desires to keep them secret is because they would create that sort of environment. That is why my group prefers to have that kind of stuff out in the open for players to know, but we expect the players to separate that from their character.
Oh, your gentle kind hearted character's behavior is a ruse and at some point your going to show yourself to be the monster you really are? Cool, thanks for letting me know about it OOC. That kind of s~+@ will get you kicked from the group if you spring it on us in surprise (by betraying us).
Now, that bit about character sheets addressed, I will say that in PF2 I find it more necessary to communicate about what kind of character you will bring to the table and what it will be able to do, more so than PF1.
In PF1 there were simply different expectations. And since most characters ended up being built without relying on others, they could do their thing effectively and didn't need the rest of the party except in that the rest of the party kept all the monsters form attacking you at once.
In PF2, there needs to be some coordination so you have various skills covered and especially medicine. And in a low level party you probably don't want more casters than non-casters (casters are low level are...I don't want to say weaker but have a hard time staying relevant in a long adventuring day.
So while it is probably "not as realistic" in a situation where the PCs are thrown together and tend to mesh well with minimal overlap, that can also lead to failure as a group if (for example) you all showed up to a game not knowing it was going to be PF2 version of skull and shackles and you don't have anyone with survival skills or athletics (for swimming) you're going to have a very hard time.*
*At least my memories of skull and shackles, especially at the start deals with a lot of survival checks and swimming.
It is more "real" to bring whatever you want blindly to the adventure? I guess, but I also think it makes the game less fun too when it results in everybody being killed or the GM needing to pull punches or change the scenario to avoid it.
Or maybe you're one of those people who enjoy Dark Souls style games, a masochist, and enjoy the frustration of failure (which you eventually overcome).
I however, am the guy who throws the controller after about 10 minutes and then plays another game instead.
|
Personally, this makes more sense to me. The characters stay together because their odds of survival are higher with that synergy. Characters that don't compliment each other wouldn't adventure together for long.Definitely up in the top corner of the wall right now. I think the most annoying thing for me is the concept that just somehow, you all got together and hey, look at that, we have somehow magically and spontaneously covered every base and are just hey-ho, built for synergy.
It breaks the verisimilitude.
Honestly it doesn't even work in MMOs. You typically want a well rounded party, because having 2 mages, or 2 rogues, or whatever competing for the same gear spot is discouraged, so people more often than not prefer to have a wide spread of complimentary classes and gear options so everyone is getting something at some point and the raid team is more balanced with buffs and such.