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Yesterday's #PF2e session was fun, despite abysmal dice rolls across the party. Hooray for Hero Points! #metacurrency
It did underscore the importance of having sufficient Low threat encounters, where rolling a 7 is still a successful hit if you manage to get an enemy Off-Guard (or Frightened or Clumsy). If you only ever have encounters where rolling anything lower than a 15 is a fluke, your level 10 badass adventurer starts feeling like a fumbling fool very quickly.
@smitty I like to demystify my dragons somewhat, after having had the pleasure of playing several D&D campaigns that featured neither dungeons nor dragons. So my dragons tend to be like that movie where a bear had too much cocaine, except the dragon is high functioning, can fly, talk, breathe fire, and possibly do magic. So... Grizzly bear-sized, usually? Elephant-sized if I'm feeling feisty. Blue Whale-sized if I want to make *a point*
@kichae Yes that's exactly the one. Because the Deadly trait specifically mentions you're not supposed to double it, but the Fatal trait doesn't, I concluded it did double. I *also* assumed the extra damage per die from the pick specialisation was doubled, so this explains why I thought picks were ridiculously powerful.
And true, crunch is much less a problem if writing and indexing is good. Less crunchy games with bad indexing are still a pain (Looking at you, #bladesinthedark)
Whilst trying to find the rules for persistent damage from several sources, I found out I haven't done the Fatal trait right since forever. Thanks some offhand remark on a page nowhere near the trait description. Sigh. The specific kind of woe that crunchy games bring. #pathfinder2e #pf2e
It was parts Berserk, parts Chtulhu, parts Indiana Jones, all Blades. The epilogues were great. We all contributed to the story and we all got an ending we loved and that fitted our characters. But our (former) newbie started that story, and as a (former) forever GM I'm super proud of them.
We delved into a tomb hidden in the lost district, where we found a bound stone demon. It offered us the secret of _Ascension_, and all we had to do was liberate it and sacrifice some two hundred innocent people who were time-trapped in the church above, and then we too could be demons. This immediatly fractured the crew along all the trauma lines, things went bonkers, two of us became demons, one of us turned into a Joker-like villain, and one fled as far away as they could.
Our #bladesinthedark #bitd campaign just ended. We rotated the role of #GM every session throughout our time playing (granted, Blades is really good for that kind of shenanigans). The finale was just GMed by the guy who two years ago hadn't played any #ttrpg whatsoever. It was absolutely amazing. Perfect ending for our ragtag crew.
Everyone should have a group where the role of GM is rotated every so often. Even if you're playing a long term campaign. Do a one shot in between. Or a 3-5 sessions arc. Sit on the other side of the screen. Play a gimmick character. Try a new game system. Finish a (short) adventure. Learn new things. All my groups are without forever GMs and it's just so much fun.
Hemsworth's no Cavill, but he's finding his own take on the character as the episodes go on. I like that we still get some monster-of-the-week stuff in between all the world shattering high stakes drama. And the whimsical storytelling episode was also nice, save for the choice of music for the Geralt-Yennefer smut scene. Wtf was that?
After taking a bit of a hiatus after ep02, I started watching s04 of The Witcher again. I still have qualms with it, but I've come to terms with the idea that this series, like so many others, is never going to be as good as s01 and s02 again. So, now having lowered my expectations, I find it rather entertaining, actually.
I'm thinking about maybe doing a #dungeon26 challenge. I've never done one before and it seems like an interesting way to train some creative muscle.
RPG highlights of the year:
* I played 7 different systems this year, 3 of which I'd never played before.
* I started running my first ever sandbox campaign, using #PF2e as my system of choice. I homebrewed a bunch hexploration rules because Paizo's weren't doing it for me.
* I successfully retired my first ever #BitD PC.
* I started this Mastodon feed, and an accompanying blog, which I failed to update after like April or so. Guess I'll try again in 2026! #newyearsresolutions
Also we found out that anathema aren't a thing anymore in the Remastered Barbarian. We decided to play with it anyway because it was fun.
Why did #paizo remove those? Those weren't so bad mechanically, and they provided interesting RP elements to play with.
This weirdly makes the whole act of kidnapping less shocking somehow. It's like suddenly you can imagine this baby has already seen some shit and is miraculously very blasé about the whole ordeal.
Baby is safe by the way. Also the baby is someone's reincarnated mom so there aren't any grieving recent parents robbed of their newborn. Only adult children and grandchildren robbed of their again-born (grand)parent.
Ran a session today where the Giant instinct Barbarian had to chose between ignoring a taunt and letting a baby be kidnapped. So uhh... yeah. New quest just dropped for someone to go and retrieve a baby. #pathfinder2e #pf2e
I mean, if people thought the OGL thing was bad, wait until they are forced to use Grok anytime they want to third party publish anything.
Musky Man buying Hasbro would actually be a great way of breaking the monopoly D&D has on ttrpg's. I kinda hope he does and just tanks it like Twitter.
The main two things were:
* Do heads have separate HP from the body? I ruled no, damage done to a head is also done to the body, but it doesn't carry over after a head is severed. This made the heads function like damage-soak minions?
* Does regeration scale with Actual Number of Heads or with Original Number of Heads? I think RAW it should scale with Actual Number of Heads, but to keep things simple I kept it stable at Regen HP is equal to Head HP.