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KPC_Mammon posted:But now they'll look into getting silver weapons, right? Not yet, and what's worse is they have found a bunch of silver weapons and sold them.
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Apr 23, 2024 02:57
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Kitfox88 posted:I'll gander at it too I guess. I'm kind of hating my rogue in Kingmaker and GM is letting me swap to a different class while keeping the character (which I do like a lot) and I was hoping to keep the nature/survival bent I've had so far. A Sniper gunslinger can easily keep that Nature/Survival/Stealth vibe as a scout/woodsman type.
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Apr 23, 2024 03:13
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mind the walrus posted:I mean, homebrewing buffing the status effects if they come from spells vs. items. Straightforward approach. I'm sure there's some very good reason why it doesn't work but like, has anyone tried it? The issue is that this also benefits the martials, so if you buff the Clumsy effect from spells your fighter is now critting constantly.
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Apr 23, 2024 10:04
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Clerical Terrors posted:It's this but also the fact that Martials can straightforwardly do this by investing in skills that already likely scale with their stats. A STR fighter is going to be at least decent at Athletics for trips, a Rogue is very likely decent at Tumble Through. But these options rarely translate to benefits for spellcasters*, and a wizard isn't going to lower saves with an Arcana check, unless you count recall knowledge, which is effectively divided over 4-5 skills and has a high chance of failure against unique enemies like bosses. OTOH, melee martials help spellcasters just by existing and standing in the way. If I'm playing anything ranged all the melee guys are my hero. Even without the "everything has attack of opportunity" problem D&D has, most enemies will prefer to attack the guy right next to them rather than the guy across the room, so every melee guy in the room is a buff to your effective AC/HP.
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Apr 23, 2024 13:03
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The Slack Lagoon posted:In the fourth level of Abomination Vaults, my party of 5x 5th level PCs almost wiped to the Vaulgrist because only one of them had an ability to to Holy or Silver damage, and that was in the form of Needle Darts. Needle darts is such a cool spell. And I like the idea of casters having a pocket full of exotic gravel.
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Apr 23, 2024 13:05
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Clerical Terrors posted:The issue is that this also benefits the martials, so if you buff the Clumsy effect from spells your fighter is now critting constantly. Facebook Aunt posted:OTOH, melee martials help spellcasters just by existing and standing in the way. If I'm playing anything ranged all the melee guys are my hero. Even without the "everything has attack of opportunity" problem D&D has, most enemies will prefer to attack the guy right next to them rather than the guy across the room, so every melee guy in the room is a buff to your effective AC/HP. To add to this-- a good GM is going to make sure that some encounters really get the martials locked up on the front line so their extra actions can be eaten up quite a lot and they need the spellcasters to do burst damage/buff/debuff/target damage to give them breathing room; while other encounters have the spellcasters unable to do much more than add moral support while the martials flex. It isn't perfect but compared to D&D5e where martials can be borderline vestigial, it's a much more sustainable dynamic.
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Apr 23, 2024 13:19
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My group is getting to the tail end of Extinction Curse and things have honestly started to shift a lot towards the casters being the most important party members. In boss fights they have the more impactful debuffs and status effects and in mob fights Chain Lightning is a spell that exists. It's started to feel like me (Barbarian) and the Fighter are pretty much just meat shields. Oh, we do damage but it's honestly started to not be THAT much higher on the whole. I guess it helps the casters that my GM can't roll saves on boss fights for poo poo though. I swear the guy has a supernatural ability to roll a 1 when saving against Slow.
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Apr 23, 2024 14:14
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I think PF2 is like many other D&D-style games in that casters start out weaker than martials but are stronger by the end…it just happens a lot more slowly, and the gap is small enough that specific classes and builds complicate it. Speaking of which, thoughts on Extinction Curse? It’s one of the two 2e APs that are worst received, I think (the other being Gatewalkers). I didn’t play it myself, but I read a completed PbP of it; the biggest issue that struck me (in addition to the one everyone mentions of the circus becoming irrelevant) is that it feels like it’s reusing a lot of ideas from Tyrant’s Grasp and Age of Ages with worse execution. Arguably some of this may have been a deliberate attempt to put twists on established AP tropes, like redoing the befriending-the-elves sequence from Age of Ashes with urdefhans of all things. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 15:33
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Speaking of urdefhans (and xulgaths), I’ve noticed that PF2 has been moving away from “evil races,” but in a patchy and inconsistent way, exacerbated by the way each PF2 ancestry requires so much game design work, with the result that you often have two superficially similar kinds of creature but one is a “person” and the other is a “monster.” Anadi are people but jorogumo are monsters; iruxi are people but xulgaths are monsters; dhampirs are people but urdefhans are monsters; vishkanya are people but serpentfolk are monsters; grippli are people but boggards are monsters; and vanara are people but charau-ka are monsters. To be fair, xulgaths are playable in Starfinder now, and Monster Core, despite the title, has moved various creatures further in the “people” direction. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 16:04
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Chevy Slyme posted:A Sniper gunslinger can easily keep that Nature/Survival/Stealth vibe as a scout/woodsman type. On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? Like, besides Performance, which is largely worthless to anyone besides bards and that one swashbuckler subclass (unless you want to use it for a downtime earn income skill), survival seems like the least useful skill barring very specific circumstances. Admittedly, several skills require "specific circumstances," like thievery requiring locked doors and traps, or society requiring interacting with bougie folks, but those don't feel as narrow as survival's niche. It annoys me that all the woodsy backgrounds with fun lore skills (farming, hunting, scouting, etc) have terrible skill feats. Oh boy, forager or assurance: survival. Sure am glad I've got that. I know this is a relatively simple "ask your GM to let you pick a new skill feat" fix, but that's not a perfect solution since PFS characters can't do that.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:33
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Dick Burglar posted:On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? I agree. Performance at least has a use for some classes, but survival is incredibly niche and will mostly only be reliable in hexcrawls. The Verduran Shadow archetype in wardens of wildwood will at least give it some utility, but that's an archetype investment to make a skill useful instead of it being useful right out of the gate.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:37
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Silver2195 posted:Speaking of urdefhans (and xulgaths), I’ve noticed that PF2 has been moving away from “evil races,” but in a patchy and inconsistent way, exacerbated by the way each PF2 ancestry requires so much game design work, with the result that you often have two superficially similar kinds of creature but one is a “person” and the other is a “monster.” Anadi are people but jorogumo are monsters; iruxi are people but xulgaths are monsters; dhampirs are people but urdefhans are monsters; vishkanya are people but serpentfolk are monsters; grippli are people but boggards are monsters; and vanara are people but charau-ka are monsters. I think you're getting hung up on "monster" as evil. Recall that there is a "monster" entry for "commoner" and "urchin" in the "downtrodded" creature family. The difference between a monster and an ancestry is just mechanical reality of how you design the statblock, not a unifying thesis on their place in society.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:49
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Silver2195 posted:I think PF2 is like many other D&D-style games in that casters start out weaker than martials but are stronger by the end…it just happens a lot more slowly, and the gap is small enough that specific classes and builds complicate it. Honestly I've not been a huge fan. I thought the first two books were pretty strong and the capstone to book 2 was really great but almost immediately afterwards it starts feeling super aimless. It does a pretty bad job of making the events something that the players really should care about and entire parts of the campaign feel haphazardly stapled on. A lot of stuff also seems to come to really anticlimactic endings. Also, in regards to the whole Xulgath being just monsters thing, our entire party had to sort of deliberately act against character to keep playing because honestly our interpretation of events is that the Xulgath are kinda right to be pissed off and demanding their orbs back. In a lot of ways I feel like the circus thing explicitly makes the overarching threat of little direct impact to the characters since they can just... Take the circus out of the Starstone Isles and let them deal with the very deserved consequences of Arodens actions. It'd probably have a stronger emotional hook if the PCs just like, lived there to begin with.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:52
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Dick Burglar posted:On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? We generally use Survival as the skill to roll when we need to do any kind of navigation and we don't have a map with a specific route or directions available, including navigating large cities, but don't quite need hexploration rules (or don't want to bother with them). The only penalty for failure usually being a number of hours lost as the party bumbles around. It's not much of a tangible benefit but it's been enough to encourage our groups to try and have at least one person trained in survival if possible.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:02
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Taciturn Tactician posted:I think you're getting hung up on "monster" as evil. Recall that there is a "monster" entry for "commoner" and "urchin" in the "downtrodded" creature family. The difference between a monster and an ancestry is just mechanical reality of how you design the statblock, not a unifying thesis on their place in society. Sure, but the pre-Remaster Bestiary entries for a lot of these creatures pretty much did present them as monolithically evil, to the point where even the still-pretty-unpleasant urdefhans in Extinction Curse are hard to reconcile with their description in Bestiary 3.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:03
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Infinity Gaia posted:Also, in regards to the whole Xulgath being just monsters thing, our entire party had to sort of deliberately act against character to keep playing because honestly our interpretation of events is that the Xulgath are kinda right to be pissed off and demanding their orbs back. Possible spoilers: I believe there’s a sidebar that acknowledges that some players may feel that way, and suggests allowing them to negotiate with one of the xulgath leaders instead of fighting them, but the details of this are left for the GM to figure out.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:10
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Silver2195 posted:Sure, but the pre-Remaster Bestiary entries for a lot of these creatures pretty much did present them as monolithically evil, to the point where even the still-pretty-unpleasant urdefhans in Extinction Curse are hard to reconcile with their description in Bestiary 3.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:32
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Infinity Gaia posted:
It's been awhile since I looked through the books, and my campaign finished the first book and got no further but: Wasn't the player circus made up of people running from a different circus that has some members show up in book one but the actual 'evil' circus shows up in book 2? My memory is hazy but what I told my players was that the big 'evil' circus had been on the big island somewhere, and then some number of them split off, formed their own circus, and hosed off to the small island. This new circus was small with not a lot of resources or reputation (that's why their playing in a podunk farming village). The ringmaster of this new circus who was nice and well-liked was murdered on maybe their first night ever performing as this new circus and that's the motivation for the first book, solving/avenging his death. But the circus is still small and poor, and I imagine shipping everyone first to the big island when they were part of the big evil circus, and then splitting off and running off to the small island drained their resources further. So, even if the circus wants to check out of the Starstone Isles, they likely don't have the money to pay passage to do so.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:42
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boxen posted:It's been awhile since I looked through the books, and my campaign finished the first book and got no further but: Yeah it's just the entire circus plotline ends in book 2 and is only kinda there in the others, and by the end of book 2 or 3 at the latest there is definitely a way for the circus to have enough resources to just gently caress off out of the isles. You don't even get the full aeon orb context until near the end of book 2 anyways. Also it's still super weird that this island saving plot has to be resolved by some circus weirdos when Absalom is RIGHT THERE. Honestly the entire circus performer premise just completely and utterly clashes with the rest of the story. If the players were just like, generic adventurers, the whole thing would make a lot more sense, imho.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:02
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Infinity Gaia posted:Yeah it's just the entire circus plotline ends in book 2 and is only kinda there in the others, and by the end of book 2 or 3 at the latest there is definitely a way for the circus to have enough resources to just gently caress off out of the isles. You don't even get the full aeon orb context until near the end of book 2 anyways. Also it's still super weird that this island saving plot has to be resolved by some circus weirdos when Absalom is RIGHT THERE. Honestly the entire circus performer premise just completely and utterly clashes with the rest of the story. If the players were just like, generic adventurers, the whole thing would make a lot more sense, imho. Okay yeah, I see your point there. With a bunch of the AP's though, you reach a point where the party just does it because they're the heroes. There might be other justifications but there a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that this group of random people just decide to band together to fix the world's problems. That's just the way Golarion works, at least occasionally. FWIW, half the players in my Extinction Curse group were excited about the premise of the circus, wanted to plan performances, invest and upgrade, etc, and the other half were just in it for the classic rpg elements. The latter group is also playing in the Abomination Vaults campaign I'm in and is satisfied with the Diablo plotline of "there's a big hole in your backyard, go down there and kill anything you find." I thought the circus setting was a fun and cool idea, and a good way to get some really unique player characters.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:00
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Alright posters. I've decided to bail on Abomination Vaults. I don't like it, my players don't like it, and we just hit the Voidglutton and got some additional deaths - a garbage loving fight in a little coffin room where I rolled well first round and murderized them. This poo poo is stupid as hell. So, I need a way to track this onto another adventure. They've seen the wall of force, they know they need to go get the macguffins to get through it. My thought here is to route them into Absalom and adapt an old PF1 adventure that I have, Gallery of Evil. Magic paintings come to life! It's not great but it will work and it takes place in the right setting. I also have a collection of battle maps and am comfortable enough with encounter design to do custom setpieces for each questline. After the Wall of Force I can do whatever I want, so I'm thinking one more level and then a custom encounter. The end. Get the gently caress out of this dumb town and this dumb dungeon. What I need is two things: of Abom Vaults level 5 - 10, what is people's favorite level? And does anyone have a bridge adventure to get them from level 7 to 11 or so after the adventure, so we can move to a different AP? Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 19:04
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The group I'm first time GMing just got through the second force wall on level 7 and into the final area so I can't comment on the quality of the last part. My favorite level of the previous three was level 6. The bar was a lot of fun for my players, and they actually went down there some even when they were on the previous level. It's one of the places in AV that's not really about combat at all though so it's kind of an outlier. The devil level could be kind of fun depending on the party but my group had no interest in taking any infernal contracts so it was just kill, kill, kill. The walls of force are kind of stupid though and I wish I would have just gotten rid of them. It's clear from the way creatures act in the dungeon that the walls of force actually don't block anything but the players from going down a level which feels gamey in a dumb way. I guess its because of the way it was released as 3 parts but they should have updated it IMO.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:14
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SithDrummer posted:Hard to reconcile in what way? The urdefhans are portrayed in both sources as as terrifying, death-obsessed warmongers and Horsemen of the Apocalypse-cultists. The only difference in Extinction Curse is that over the course of book 5, the heroes make themselves known as extremely capable badasses that this particular cult of urdefhans would rather use to their own ends than attempt to kill for no reason. I’m mostly thinking of the writeup on War Champion Kharostan. He’s still evil, but he’s slightly more complex than Bestiary 3 implies an urdefhan (let alone a half-daemon urdefhan!) is capable of being. This isn’t a complaint about Extinction Curse, to be clear; it’s a complaint about Bestiary 3. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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