No, really, I just care about hygiene
-
As the other commenter says though, this isn’t true for most other systems.
It was true for 3.5. Nevermind 4e, which was a naked play to shoehorn D&D back into the then-lucrative war-gaming miniatures market.
Also, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s bad either. I just find it’s a design decision that shifts how the game is played.
You lose a lot of the more avant guard aspects of table top RPGs in favor of a ridge, easier to export system.
D&D is one system.
-
PF2e tries to have it both ways:
-
If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit.
-
If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss.
-
Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit).
-
Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail).
In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D.
But when you’re out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe not, and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it’s time to run.
Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.
Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it’s a pretty elegant system.
That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.
That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.
I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that
-
-
That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.
That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.
I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that
It’s more formalized than Fate, but absolutely. There are feat trees, even entire classes that make that their whole deal. Buffs, special moves and tactics, AOE debuffs, heal spells that target a different number or area of creatures depending on how many actions you use to cast them, the whole thing.
Paizo just released “Battlecry” last month, and the new classes in the book would be terrible for a solo game: the Guardian (literally a big sack of hit points with high AC, but with special powers to force enemies to attack them and only them) and the Commander (a class that the RPGBot guys called “Dual-Wield your friends!” because they have, among many other support actions, an ability that lets them give one teammate the ability to shove an enemy toward another teammate, who can then hit it. On the commander’s turn.)
But every character can use the Aid action, which is very powerful, and often worth sacrificing an attack for; especially if your multiple attack penalty is at -10.
-
Here’s my list:
- It scales very well from level 1-20. The math just works at all levels of play.
- 3 action rounds
- Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
- All of the classes are good, flavorful, and have interesting options
- Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
- Martial/Caster/Support balance
- Degrees of success/failure
- Easy, free access to the rules
- The ORC license
- https://pathbuilder2e.com/
- Pathfinder Society Organized play is well done and well supported by Paizo
- The rune system for magic weapons/armor
Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn’t have giant blank spots that you’re expected to fill in for a few levels. They’re switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn’t shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.
-
My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?
I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat?
D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way.
D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight’s armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there’s decent odds. But he certainly won’t be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power.
Other systems are more deadly.
Personally, I don’t like the “these goblins can’t even touch me anymore” mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat
Sure but Pathfinder 2E is explicitly about teamwork and positioning. One archer will not be able to hit the death knight unless it’s very lucky (which IMHO makes sense), but an archer supported by some melee fighters flanking the knight and giving them some off-guard malus has way better odds. “Every +1 matters” is true for both the party and the NPCs
I understand heroic fantasy not being your cup of tea, that’s the beauty of having lots of RPGs to choose from. But beware of thinking that bounded accuracy makes things more gritty. In my experience it just makes things more heroic for the party (which can now take down a dragon at level 2) and just breaks down after the first dozen levels
-
I’m a gunslinger in one of the games I play in, and yeah, I don’t do barbarian numbers, but I hold my own, and it is a FUN class to play. I built a dual-wielder with the hopes that it would play like Han Solo running down the hallway shooting back at stormtroopers, and it delivers.
Plus, being 60 feet away means that I can help everyone do damage at once. It makes the party happy, too.
Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don’t lay down much damage, but they can move, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip).
I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I’m just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.
-
Re: oracle
Being a divine spontaneous caster fucks; your entire spell list is Heal if you need it, and literally anything else if you don’t. And trading a spell/day and slightly smaller repertoire for some extra durability is generally worth it in my experience.
Also Divine Access means you can pretty much pick whatever spells you want, and more as more gods come out or you and your GM make some more.
I liked the focus spells more back when battle oracles weren’t hit with the nerf bat and could literally just be the juggernaut whenever they got cursed
I’ve always been allergic to spell casters (the strategy behind the best use of spell slots just never clicked for me - which is extra painful because it seems like if should be simple, but I consistently manage to botch it), going back to when i picked this all up in the 3.0e days.
I think that’s caused me to not really engage with the spell casting side of spell casters in PF2e. I remember in 3.5, we banned Mystics because spontaneous divine spell casting was broken, so maybe I just need to run one to see if work.
-
There’s literally a book called How to be a GURPS GM that’s a pretty good blend of system agnostic and GURPS specific advice. Additionally, Chris Normand has a pretty good Intro to GURPS video series on YouTube
Sounds like a good resource, but I guess what I meant was a setting to run a game in (e.g. a campaign set in the Inner Sea or Sword Coast) with enemies and grabbags of challenges with balanced NPCs for side interactions and such.
-
This post did not contain any content.
I’ve come to the conclusion that 3.5e was the peak of TTRPG and frankly I’ve just decided I’m going to go back to that. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of 3.5e materials to use.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Pathfinder is D&Ds brother that studied business and economy instead of theater
-
Here’s my list:
- It scales very well from level 1-20. The math just works at all levels of play.
- 3 action rounds
- Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
- All of the classes are good, flavorful, and have interesting options
- Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
- Martial/Caster/Support balance
- Degrees of success/failure
- Easy, free access to the rules
- The ORC license
- https://pathbuilder2e.com/
- Pathfinder Society Organized play is well done and well supported by Paizo
- The rune system for magic weapons/armor
You forgot counteracting. So effin elegant!
-
Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don’t lay down much damage, but they can move, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip).
I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I’m just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.
That’s awesome. I haven’t gotten my head around a swashbuckler myself, but the ones I’ve seen play definitely feel like they’re “of a kind” with gunslingers.
It’s worth noting, too, that the gunslinger “way” that you choose will define a lot of how the class plays. My pistolero’s quick, seemingly careless gunplay will feel very different from someone who builds a sniper and is much more methodical and sneaky.
