Is… is there some reason to read “How to do X without Y” as some kind of value judgement against Y? Because, like, some of us just can’t do accents. I can’t even do my own regional accent, and never have been able to. There being a resource for someone like me doesn’t really invite this “fuck you” attitude you’re bringing, dude, and frankly, it feels like you’re saying it to people like me when you’re coming after something that seems targeted at me.

Spend almost any amount of time below the fold of the Internet and you’re likely to come across someone smugly repeating their junior high grammar lessons in front of the whole of humanity. They’re telling someone they shouldn’t’ve used “should of”, that it’s not OK to use “its”, and that they’re nauseated by people claiming to feel nauseous. Or that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, even!

Large scale social media tends towards competitive spaces, where participants are jockeying for likes, shares, up-votes, or some other form of passive micro-validation just in order to get eyeballs on what they have to say and to feel heard. Ironically, this tends to limit what someone can say, boiling a discussion down to a few choice strategies for gaining social approval.

One of these strategies is flexing their intelligence by being technically correct, something that leads to engage in prescriptive rhetoric, like such as over-correcting someone’s grammar, even when everyone around understood what the original speaker was trying to say.

TTRPG discussion tends towards prescriptivism as a mater of course, since rule sets are, well, prescriptions for playing the game. Rules also – generally speaking at least – have a singularly defined intent behind their existence, which while sometimes debatable, are not usually meant to be open to interpretation. Or, at least, this is the common conceit of spaces dedicated to discussing said rules. As a “crunchy” rule set with a specific focus on balance – and therefore on math and numerics – Pathfinder Second Edition discussions are especially prone to this kind of thing.

I mean, it makes sense, right? The game has a lot of rules! Clearly it wants to be viewed through a prescriptivist, mechanics-first lens!

Right?

But what if it doesn’t?

What if the more natural lens to view the game through is not the one that low-key paints it out to be an overly-needy and insufferable pedant? What if, instead, the designers knew they were making an imagination game built for co-operative storytelling, and not just Lord of the Rings X-COM with an atrocious frame rate? How might we interpret the the rules then?

While the prescriptive view of the rules leads to a mechanics-first understanding of the game, a descriptive view supports a fiction-first one, and smooths over a lot of the rough edges that new players who are more accustomed to a less rigid form of play experience when trying out the game for the first time. For instance, many players coming from 3.5 or 5e take issue with the game’s ‘Action’ framework, where every thing that characters do in the game is filtered through pre-defined Actions such as Strike, Trip, Shove, Sense Motive, Seek, Take Cover, etc. They come across the fairly long list of basic Actions and see them as meaning that the game is finicky, and even demanding. Some even end up feeling that players are confined to only do things that are ‘pre-approved’ by the list.

You know, because game rules are ‘supposed’ to tell you what players are supposed to, or allowed to, do.

The descriptive interpretation of Basic Actions, though, is that they are describing typical play, and act as examples to the GM about how to handle rulings for the most common or useful cases, providing a framework for improvising actions in the process. Anyone familiar with other d20 fantasy games should quickly recognize that most Actions are just descriptions of skill checks, anyway, sometimes with a little rider or critical success/failure effect.

The prescriptive, mechanics-first lens, then, has this tendency to make play sound very clinical, e.g.:

Player 1: “I use the Stride Action to approach the enemy, the Trip Action, and the Strike Action with my longsword.”

Player 2: I use the Cast a Spell Activity to cast Fireball, and then use the Cast a Spell Activity to cast Shield.

even though this would sound totally bizarre and foreign to even most tactically invested tables. The fiction-first approach, though, sounds more natural (and also doesn’t require the player to remember the specific names of the various Actions):

Player 1: “I charge the enemy, trying to knock him to the ground before attacking with my longsword!”

Player 2: I cast Fireball, and then… umm… cast Shield.

Here, it’s up to the GM to decide what “knocking the enemy to the ground” means, but the most common ruling for this is going to end up being “roll Athletics against Reflex” or “roll Athletics against Fortitude”. The game defines Trip by the former, and Reflex is, in fact, the save that makes the most sense if you’re trying to describe the reality of getting knocked off your feet – keeping yourself on your feet is usually more a feat of dexterity than it is of whatever “constitution” is!

“But what if the GM picks Fortitude, like a stupid, uneducated philistine?," I hear you ask. "Doesn’t that break the tactical element of the game?” And yes, it kind of does! It would buff the defences of low Ref monsters, potentially considerably. If your table is concerned about maintaining good tactical hygiene, it’s important for GMs to either remember that Trip is Ref and Shove is Fort, or have a strong enough understanding of hand-to-hand combat to intuitively know what is a DEX-based save and what is a CON-based one. But if your table isn’t concerned about tactical hygiene?

Then it probably doesn’t matter.

And if your table is concerned about it, but it’s somebody else’s table that’s running it that way, it definitely doesn’t matter to you.

I know this all sounds pretty pedantic so far. Really, what’s the big difference between being more formal and stiff with describing your turn vs being more fluid and narrative? At the end of the day, the math is all the same, and the game ends up playing the same way, right?

Well, things start to diverge pretty quickly once you start pointing your descriptive lens at various elements of the game.

The Game Expects…

It is sometimes shocking how demanding some people believe the game to be. Every time I turn around, it feels like someone is telling a new player or a struggling GM that “the game expects” this, and “the game expects” that, and every time I see it I’m left wondering if people bought very different books than I did, or if the Archives of Nethys are serving up very different pages to me, for it seems like they’re playing a very different game than the one I engage in each week.

“The game expects" is, of course, the catchphrase of prescriptivism.

The most common topics subject to this line of thinking are things like:

• player conditions (“the game expects everyone to be at full health at the start of battle”)
• gold at level [n]”)
• encounter size (“the game expects battles to have budgets of no more than 160 XP”)
• character stat distributions (“the game expects you to have a +4 in your key attribute” or “the game expects you to have potency and striking runes by level [n]”).

All of these statements regularly bring the system into conflict with new players and GMs – particularly those coming from 5e – and, importantly, literally none of them are true. But at this point, they’re all practically dogma to the most vocal parts of the online Pathfinder 2e community.

The descriptive lens on these elements are that these are mostly – the first three, in particular – just signposts, or marked gradations that are useful for reference: If you build an 80 XP encounter, it will present a Moderate threat to a party of 4 who are at full HP; if your encounter has 120 HP, it will use significant party resources, and may even turn deadly, for a party of 4 at full health; etc. If your party is at half their max HP, however, the counters could end up being much more difficult! If you build a 100 XP encounter, it will be more dangerous than an 80 XP fight!

Importantly, you do not need to decide on the difficulty of the encounter before you build it. You can, instead, decide that there’s a Goblin raiding camp over this hill, and it just so happens to have 5 Goblin Commandos, 2 Goblin Pyros, and 20 Goblin Warriors in it, just come back from a successful raid. For a party of 4 Level 3 adventurers, this camp represents a 100 + 40 + 200 = 340 XP encounter, which is more than twice the power budget of an Extreme encounter. As a GM, you know that this camp is a problem for your party.

But the game is about finding solutions to problems, is it not?

The prescriptive lens says that this encounter is illegal – outside the bounds of the rules – since the encounter barometer caps off at 160 XP, but the descriptive lens just says “sounds like the party’s going to get messed up right some good”.

A similar thing plays out if we look at the Treasure by Level table. The prescriptivist view is that players must get 3 Level 1 consumables, 2 Level 2 consumables, 2 permanent items of both Level 1 and Level 2, plus 40 gold in coin and disposable treasure over the span of Level 1. They shall not receive less, and they should not receive more (within reason)! If the GM does not give them their allotted entitlement, then that GM is starving the PCs and depriving their players of the Proper Pathfinder Experience! And they’re just running the game wrong!

But the thing is, this requires GMs to craft encounters that have just the right loot buried in them, or to create environments that have just the right amount of treasure for reasons beyond reasonable explanation. Shouldn’t the environment the players find themselves in dictate how much loot, and of what kind, the players find? Shouldn’t the amount of effort players put into actually looking for loot matter? The descriptivist GM would say so, but the (strawman) prescriptiveist would say that their Level 1 players find 40 gp and some healing potions for robbing a bank, and in the process they might only come across a couple of guards, throwing themselves at them black ninja style.

Through the descriptivist lens, the Treasure by Level table just tells us where the sweet spot in the power curve is. At each level, a certain amount of the player’s power budget is taken up by items and gear, and the Treasure by Level table marks off where the standard is for each level. A player who has significantly less than listed will be less powerful than the ‘Standard’ character of their level, and the one who has significantly more than what’s listed will be more powerful. But being below or above the curve isn’t a problem through this lens, it’s just a description of the current state of the game. If players are under the curve, they may find 80 XP encounters a little harder than the ‘Moderate’ description, and if they’re over it, they’ll find them a little easier.

And that’s OK.

The Prescriptive Lens and Tactical Power Gaming

Things like battle budgets and treasure tables make sense as things people would see as dictated by the game, since they are directly part of the text of the rule books. Even though the game text does not come out and directly use the word “should” when discussing these topics, it’s totally logical that a new GM is going to look at them and say “this is what the game recommends”. And for a new table, these do a huge amount of the heavy lifting with respect to providing predictable combat encounters, which are touted as one of the major selling points of the system.

But where do these ideas around players being ‘expected’ to have full health, or ‘needing’ to have a +4 in their key attribute come from? They’re not found in any of the rule books! At least, not explicitly. And they’re not things that new players or GMs would necessarily intuit from reading the text.

Many argue that the the received wisdom of always having full health is a corollary of the encounter building system, since fights are bigger threats than advertised if players are significantly lacking in resources. For some reason, however, the only resource people seem to insist that players should not be lacking is HP, even though the designers will specifically call out Spell Slots, Focus Points, and even consumables when discussing the topic. The idea that player are entitled to full spell slots, free potions, or a flight of Alchemist’s Fire just never seems to come up.

The real clue is in the rhetoric around the key ability modifier. Again, not something that comes up anywhere in the system’s library, the received wisdom to maximize this value comes from the fact that it optimizes damage. And if you spend time observing the community’s attitudes towards sub-optimal play, things really start to snap into focus.

The majority of online discussions about Pathfinder 2e are quietly, almost secretly, power gaming or optimization discussions, regardless of whether the people initiating the discussion are seeking optimization advice. Some fans have even argued that the expectation of optimization is baked into the game’s core, built on top of the assumption that the game is really a tactical combat game wearing the skin of a roleplaying game. Power gamers and tactical combat game fans both love rigid systems and predictable math, and Pathfinder 2e provides plenty of the latter. The game can easily and much more reliably present what these groups are looking for than many other systems out there, especially if they also want in on that d20 fantasy lifestyle. But the idea that it’s a roleplaying game second?

This is a thesis that I, personally, vigorously and wholeheartedly reject.

The game can be a rigid, tactical power game, if that’s how you want to utilize the the tools in its toolbox. And if it is, more power to you. I’m really quite incredibly glad the game can be played in that way, both because I like a big tent, and also because I like the occasional tactical combat game (Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is by far my favourite game I got from Ubisoft during my tenure with the company), but it can also be a lot of other things, depending on how you utilize those tools.

Because that’s what the rules are: Tools to help you craft a gaming experience tailored to your table. And these tools work just as well, and make just as much sense – if not more – if viewed through a descriptive, fiction-first lens. And playing the game in a fiction-first way quickly highlights that Pathfinder 2e is a very flexible, kitchen-sink fantasy RPG that is just as good at being a collective storytelling engine as it is at being a crunchy, mechanics-first tactical sword and sorcery game.

It doesn’t get nearly as much credit or attention for this as it deserves.

This was the largest encounter I’ve ever run, and what an experience it was! I learned as much from this one fight as I have from months of adventure prep and minor encounters.

We’re a very casual table, just me, my partner, my step-son and a friend, running short (~90 minutes) sessions every week or two. We’re progressing slowly, and levelling up even more slowly. I decided early on, due to the material I’ve, uh, stolen my ideas from, that level progression would be locked to McGuffin acquisition, but speed with which the party is actually getting their hands on these objects is much slower than I had initially expected.

We’ve settled into a tick-tock adventure cadence, then, with mid-level power-ups being added via gold and item injections into keep everyone happy. Which is all to say, when the players level up, it’s a big deal, and I’ve taken to giving them something worthy of their new powers to cut their teeth on.

This time, we’d been running the Forge of Fury, which I converted as we went.

Consider this a spoiler warning for this 25 year old module!

Hiding in the third section of the dungeon – known as the Foundry – was the party’s second McGuffin, and after some unexpectedly friendly interactions with a group of Hryngars (nee Duergars), a frightening from an Allip, and a really awkward discussion with a crypto-succubus, they managed to find their level-up trinket.

The original adventure hook for the module was to go searching for some ancient +1 weapons, or some such, but that seemed like some pretty weak sauce. The intent was also for players to delve too deep and encounter Nightwing, the black dragon and its hoard of gold, but I’d sent the players in there looking for an NPC and a McGuffin, and have a setting where dragons are very rare, and where at least some of the enemies are (unbeknowst to the players) trying to resurrect a dragon, so just throwing one at the players early in the campaign would be kind of undermining.

So I threw zombies at them, instead. A lot of zombies.

Forge of Fury has a Xulgath (nee Troglodyte) den on the second level, and that is where I stuffed the NPC they were trying to find/rescue. Unfortunately, the party bypassed the den, and took the outer route around the outskirts of the dungeon. This meant that the amped up Drow Sorceress/Necromancer I had following them had some bodies she could unalive and then un-unalive.

Not exactly RAW, of course, since it takes a full day to use the Create Undead ritual for a single target, but the players don’t know this, and what they don’t know can’t hurt them. Besides, Summon Undead is a Rank 1 spell. *shrug*

The players return to the main hall, new power-up in hand, to discover the troop of friendly Duergars fighting a large wave of shambling Troglodytes (a Level 4 Shambling Troop).

It’s at this point that I hand them the stat blocks for the Duergars and a list of names that they will be playing. Each of them got 2 Duergars Sharpshooters and a Duergar specialist of some type to play, which I expected them to use as cannon fodder.

Each round, I unleashed new creatures onto the battle field. First, it was spiders (four Hunting Spiders and a Huge Spider Swarm), then it was the missing NPC’s party (2 human Zombie Shamblers), then it was the Xulgath leader and an Orc captive (2 Zombie Brutes). Some skeletal warriors and a Ragewight followed this, before themselves being followed by the boss: A custom built undead anti-paladin, representing the NPC they failed to save.

The battle was chaos, in the best way. Even with this giant roster of enemies, the players got a turn every couple of enemies, and my partner seemed really into the idea of running multiple creatures, and letting the dice determine their personalities.

This was also the encounter where I decided to say “ok, fuck it” more often. As we’ve played, I’ve been increasingly convinced that PF2 not just works as a fiction-first game, but plays better that way. I’ve lacked the confidence to truly give in to this idea at the table though. But with three other characters at her fingertips, all of them martials, my partner started mulling over her character sheet less, and just… dropped her knees into the boss’s back. The NPC was tied up at this point, and prone, thanks to a critically successful bola attack, so there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about this. I thought about it for a second and decided that it sounded like an unarmed strike to me. But it also sounded like she was now on top of the guy. Like, that’s what happens when you drive your knees into a prone person’s back, right? So, I threw caution to the wind, let the fiction take over, and told her “you’re now sitting on top of him”.

The light in her eyes at hearing that was magical.

On his turn the NPC shook her off, broke his bonds, and got to his feet. The battle resumed, but something had changed. The players now understood that they had permission to try things, and I had confidence that I could decide whether what they were trying made sense, and, importantly, what potential outcomes made sense.

The fight ended a couple of rounds later, the boss disarmed (they thought to kick his sword away) and once more knocked to the ground. The party’s Guardian did a Smash Bros. style leaping downward strike with his sword, pinning him in place, while two enlarged Duergars stomped a mudhole in him. After four sessions, and nine rounds of combat, the battle was won, and the module was complete.

And my table finally started seeing the game through their characters’ eyes, as a world where they can try to get away with anything.

Hmm. Something seems a little out of wack, as XP doubles every 2 levels, but you’re scaling things linearly here. One Level 1 creature is worth 40 XP to a combat vs a group of 4 Level 1 PCs, so things work out here. But a Level 2 creature is worth 60 XP, not 80, and 60 * 4 = 240, not 320.

If you’re indexing the creature XP to Level 1, the XP curve looks like this (where Approx XP uses a 240 baseline for Level 2 as they do in the books, and XP is using exact scaling):

Level	XP	Approx XP	Linear Scaling
1	160.0	160	160
2	226.3	240	320
3	320.0	320	480
4	452.5	480	640
5	640.0	640	800
6	905.1	960	960
7	1280.0	1280	1120
8	1810.2	1920	1280
9	2560.0	2560	1440
10	3620.4	3840	1600
11	5120.0	5120	1760
12	7240.8	7680	1920
13	10240.0	10240	2080
14	14481.5	15360	2240
15	20480.0	20480	2400
16	28963.1	30720	2560
17	40960.0	40960	2720
18	57926.2	61440	2880
19	81920.0	81920	3040
20	115852.4	122880	3200
21	163840.0	163840	3360
22	231704.8	245760	3520
23	327680.0	327680	3680
24	463409.5	491520	3840
25	655360.0	655360	4000
26	926819.0	983040	4160
27	1310720.0	1310720	4320
28	1853638.0	1966080	4480
29	2621440.0	2621440	4640
30	3707276.0	3932160	4800

Using Level 1 indexed XP (let’s call it XP_1, for the sake of brevity), your example above becomes 560 XP shared between either 4 equally levelled characters (140 XP) or 3 unequally levelled ones, with it being unclear how exactly to divvy up the reward.

I’m not convinced your use of level as weight works, due to the fact that level power does not scale linearly. Instead, I would look to the players’ contribution to the party’s XP pool. PCs have an encounter XP budget that’s the same as monsters’, by level, which means the mixed party has 160+240+240 = 640 XP between them. The Level 1 character contributes 160/640 = 0.25, or 1/4 of the party’s XP, so they should probably receive 1/4 of the XP reward.

560 * 0.25 = 140 XP, which is what they would get if it was a party of 4 Level 1 PCs.

The other two characters each contribute 37.5% of the party’s XP, so they would each receive 560 * 0.375 = 210 XP, which would scale to 150 XP in the standard rolling XP window.

I’ve been kicking this math around for a while now on scrap paper. There’s been a small spike in questions around XP and balance over on r/Pathfinder2e, though, so maybe I’ll work through his a little and make it a little more accessible/searchable.

I don’t know, I this phrasing seems quite evocative to me. Tremble means to waver in tone or power, gravel means to hoarse or growling in a low energy fashion, and words colliding means for words to flow into one another in a fluid and informal way. This all makes speech sound less confident, and less educated. Meanwhile, neat speech is formal, and clipped speech has clear start and end points to words, and so clear distinctions between neighbouring words.

Your work is incredible, especially that hat!

Welcome to the network!

Roll a Perception check before you act

• When entering a new dungeon, it’s smart to Search it, and you will greatly improve your chances of surviving an encounter with an unknown denizen if you Recall Knowledge before you interact with them. This is true in digital dungeons, too! Lurking in the shadows and familiarising yourself with the customs and practices of the space before engaging will set you up for success better than charging in like Leroy Jenkins.

Make sure you’re Trained in Society and Diplomacy

• Your best tools in social encounters are Society and Diplomacy. Following the social conventions and speaking thoughtfully and respectfully, with consideration for where your audience is, will take you far.
  1. Use commas, paragraphs, and formatting tools (like parentheses – or even dashes!) to keep your communiques as legible as possible, and avoid using all-caps, as it’s considered to be the written equivalent to having your voice boom like you’re reminding someone to NOT TAKE YOU FOR SOME CONJURER OF CHEAP TRICKS.
  2. Stay on topic. Trying to change the subject of discussion, disrupt the discussion by holding other conversations in the comments, or hijacking an audience is considered bad form, and will impose a circumstance penalty on your CHA checks.
  3. Avoid posting empty or meaningless replies to topics in an attempt to lure wayward adventurers to the conversation. Creatures will quickly become immune to your Deception attempts.
  4. Do not attempt to use the Resurrect ritual on topics that have been dead and buried for a significant amount of time, particularly if you were not involved in the discussion during its natural life. Most folks fear Necromancers.
  5. Tag spoilers.

Alignment Matters

• Adventurers don’t usually take kindly to Evil characters in their party, and especially Chaotic Evil ones. Making your purpose getting a rise out of others, trying to ruin other adventurers’ fun, or just wanting to watch the world burn will mostly likely see you disinvited from the table.
  1. Don’t be a troll. Nor an Ogre, a Troglodyte, or any other large, clumsy bully.
  2. Don’t feed the trolls. Nor the Ogres, the Troglodytes, or… They feed off of your attention. Let them starve.
  3. No flaming. Fireball should not be cast indoors.
  4. No flame-baiting. Don’t entice others to cast Fireball on you.
  5. Don’t abuse your power. In your adventures, you will come across some people who have more powers or abilities than you, and many others who have less. Whether an apprentice cleric, a journeyman warrior, an archmage, or a master of games and dungeons, it’s prudent to understand that we are all at the same table. Using your powers for the table’s benefit, and giving the others you see sitting around the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to do the same creates a better adventuring environment!

Don’t announce your parting.

• You automatically fail your Stealth checks when you tell everyone you’re going to go hiding behind the bushes.

NotASnark That’s super cool. I gave my players some NPCs to operate for a dungeon boss fight, and they straight up adopted them as secondary characters.

I was reallly surprised. Happy for them, but super surprised. They haven’t had a session since the adoption, though. I hope they enjoy it as much as you guys!

The Voyager's Workshop Brilliant! I haven’t seen Jay in a while. I’ll swing by soon and see what he’s got in stock.

Thanks!

0. Rules As Intended

These rules exist to maintain the forum as a friendly, fun, and inclusive space. The intent and spirit of these rules are far, far more important than the letter. Engage in good faith; don’t be rules lawyers.

1. Be Civil

Treat other adventurers with a basic level of respect. Do not pick on, insult, harass, grief, dox, or threaten other community members, or users of other websites using this forum (via the World page).

We’re all just folk here. None of us are on our best behaviour all of the time, nor should we expect anyone to be. But if we all work to avoid toxicity, and to counter it when we find it coming from others, we can create a healthy space for us all.

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Yes, this is covered under Rule 1, but let’s double down on this. Discriminatory or inflammatory comments related to peoples age, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, disabilities, or other identifying properties will not be tolerated.

3. No Explicitly Adult Content

Try to keep thins PG-13. The hobby is enjoyed by adventurers of all ages, and we want to create an environment that is as welcoming as possible to everybody.

The forum is accessible via other websites. If you want to engage in discussions that are not appropriate for minors while also engaging respectfully with other members of the party, please consider engaging remotely, via federated websites running services like Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, Friendica, or Hubzilla.

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6. Follow Good Netiquette

The basic rules of behaviour on the Internet have been handed down from medium to medium, forum to forum, user to user for actual, literal generations now. Adventurers are expected to have a basic understanding of The Deep Magic and adhere to proper netiquette and forum hygiene.

u/Teridax68 is back again with more homebrew. This time, they’ve published a number of Witch archetypes and variant rules.

• Quicker Familiar Resurrections: Should your familiar happen to find themselves dying too often, particularly from massive damage at early levels, this variant lets you regain the larger part of your class features within the adventuring day at a price. By trading a portion of your soul to your patron, you doom yourself and regain your familiar, or wound yourself if you’d prefer a less harsh condition.

• Universalist Casting: As a more extreme variant, should you wish for ultimate spellcasting versatility, you can choose to cast any spell as an occult spell. You must still learn spells as normal, though, and lessons require you to learn a spell as a prerequisite instead of giving you that spell for free. This is a significant power boost to the class, and as the variant itself mentioned, you’ll want to coordinate with your fellow casters if implementing this variant to avoid treading on their toes, even if they will still have major class features you’ll lack.

• Gunwitch Class Archetype: Basing itself off of the runaway success of the Gunwitch NPC, this class archetype changes your Witch’s familiar to a firearm, trading off your focus spell for the ability to fire bewitched shots. Additional feats let you opt into Gunslinger feats more easily, gain more abilities from the Gunwitch’s stat block, enhance your firearm familiar even further, or empower yourself to shoot even faster and perform devastating gun finishers.

• Hexed Witch Class Archetype: For the player wanting to more out of Witch’s Armaments and more of a hag flavor out of their Witch, the Hexed Witch transfers a great degree of your spellcasting power into martial effectiveness, making you a wave caster much like a Magus or Summoner. Archetype-exclusive feats let you attack through your familiar, increase the synergy between your unarmed attacks and spells, and even let you cheat death by clawing your way out of your own familiar.

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Homebrewery Link:

Original Post:

rhaxapopouetl@ttrpg.network Rules light systems are kind of weird in this framework, aren’t they? Especially micro systems, like one-pagers. Being rules light and short on page space, they trust their audience to not rules lawyering munchkins, and many just go straight to describing the mechanics (well, that and the premise/ of course).

But they’re obviously fiction-first games.

It’s the crunchy games where things seem to get… frustrating, with many people reading them through a mechanics-first lens, and then asking over and over again “why does X work like this”? Or “why does Y even exist when it’s not as good as Z? Who would ever pick that?” Entire player cohorts ignore the idea that designers create the rules and options to support a fiction.

I haven’t played many rules-light games, but I’ve never personally seen this behavioir from those players. I’ld love to hear some horror stories to gain some perspective, though.

It’s really exciting seeing a new wave of artists showing up here! I know it’s a smaller space than Elon’s noise machine, or even BlueSky, and a more complicated space than either, too. I hope you guys are getting a warm welcome.

u/Teridax68 has put together a short Summoner subclass to allow you to play as a pair of identical twins.

This one-page brew does exactly what it says on the tin: I’ve seen quite a few requests over time for an Eidolon that looked and felt like a Summoner’s twin, and tried to implement just that. The implementation is also fairly straightforward: you and your twin have a complementary set of skills, and as your bond with your Eidolon strengthens, so does your ability to use your skills in sync with one another. As an added bonus, if you want to play as identical twins, you get the option to do just that with a 1st-level evolution feat.

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Homebrewery Link:

Original Post:

Engaging with federated content in a classical message board has been an absolute trip. This is admittedly kind of weird, but nodeBB v4 actually takes my breath away sometimes, and feels like magic.

I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like once the ActivityPub integration matures.

This is a post by Reddit user u/FarDeskFree who, during the Battlecry! playtest defended the Guardian as Good, Actually. Reproducing here in its entirely, for posterity.

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I’m seeing a lot of hate for Guardian on this sub and it honestly kind of baffles me. I don’t think the class is perfect or complete but for a playlets I think it is in remarkably good shape. I am actually far more excited about playing one than I am the Commander.

I have played a lot of tanks in this game. It is probably my most common party role and I’ve gotten to do it at level low and high levels, (or at least as high as 16 and counting anyway). Champion has long been one off my favorite classes in the game, but I’ve played just about every tank build imaginable including: Champion, Barbarian, Armor Inventor, Mountain Stance Monk, Earthen-Armored Kineticist, I even played a mostly tanky Fighter for a little while.

In all of those the one thing I never did was optimize to deal damage. Well…. The fighter might be an exception but that’s Fighter, that’s his thing.

It feels like when issues of balance between classes is brought up on this sub, or when people try to talk about how good or bad a class is so much off the conversation is focused around damage output.

I have a whole separate soap-box around how good of a class I think Summoner can be if you stop focusing on trying to do damage with your Eidolon and actually play like a caster. My Angelic Summoner with a divine sorcerer archetype might be the best pf2e healer/support I’ve ever seen, but all that is beside the point.

Back to Gaurdian. People seem to be pretty disappointed in Taunt, and I really don’t get it. The hardest part of playing tank is that once a creature figures out you’re hard to hit, they stop targeting you and aim for your backline. Taunt is the best remedy for this I’ve seen. People keep comparing it to Barbarian (especially Giant Barb) but I really don’t think it’s a fair comparison. Yes, you take a -2 to that creature, so it looks similar on paper, but lets also keep proficiency in mind.

Barbarian get’s expert AC at 13th level and never even hits Master.

Fighter gets Expert AC at 11th level and Master at 17th.

Champion (the previous AC champ) goes Expert at 7th, Master at 13th, and Legend at 17th.

Prior to this playlets, Champ and and Monk were the only classes in the game to get Legendary AC.

Guardian picks up expert at 5th level, Master at 11th, and Legendary at 15th!

So looking back at comparing this to a Barb’s rage feature, By the time the Barbarian even gets Expert in AC, Guardian is two levels shy of Legendary. -2 AC might look similar on paper, but prof has the Guard ahead by somewhere between +2 and +4 depending on what level we make the comparison.

Not only that, but the Barbarian has a penalty to their AC against everybody, and Taunt only gives a single enemy that buff, and we haven’t touched on the buff that Taunt gives to your whole team.

You effectively increase all of their ACs by 1-3 depending on a roll, and that’s 1 on a monster rolling a success, they have to crit your class DC in order for your team not to get the benefit. So let’s look at how that DC scales. Turn out it actually scales identically to Champion with Expert at 9th, and Master at 17th. This is about 2 levels after the full spell casters get their increased to Spell DC.

You will not that I said “Effectively” increases, and that is a very important distinction. In actuallity the emery is taking a penalty to their attack roll, which is actually a huge difference because that means that it stacks with all kinds of other AC buffs that your buddies could have. It stacks with the Protection/Circle of Protection spells, it stakes with shields, it stacks with Rallying Anthem, it stacks with weapons that have the parry trait, it stacks with the Dueling Parry feat line. It really can’t be overstated how good this is. It is very difficult to find stackable AC buffs in this game. A Guardian and Bard together could in theory buff their whole party’s AC by +6 in addition to whatever Shields and other things they’ve got going on between a crit fail on Taunt and a Critical success Fortissimo Composition of Rallying Anthem. That turns a severe boss encounter into a big wet noodle!

So to sum up, you have the best AC in the freaking game, which you can choose to lower down to EVERYONE ELSE’S AC in order increase your whole party by 1-3 and you can just keep doping this every damn turn. The baddie is defending with a Will save, which is typically a low save for big bruisers who it hard. Let’s also mention here that Taunt gives you a circumstance penalty to AC, which doesn’t stack with Off-Guard so if you were already flanked, it isn’t even a penalty.

All this is really only talking on that one mechanic though, there are so many other cool little things in there. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

You get armor spec. out the gate, compared to Champion who has to wait until 7th level, and fighter at 11th.

You then get greater armor spec, which doubles your resistance from the previous ability as of 13th level.

The Mitigate Harm Threat technique is awesome! The worst part of lowering your AC to your Taunt target is not getting hit more, it’s getting crit more, which this gives a specific resistance to that scales overtime.

The Raise Haft feat lets you parry with a 2 handed weapon, and if the weapon already had the parry trait (such as a Bow Staff, or fucking Mithral Tree) it increases the parry from +1 to +3. For those keeping track at home, that more than offsets your penalty from Taunt and is better than a shield, albeit you don’t get to mitigate damage with Shield Block with a Parry weapon, but that also competes with Intercept Strike for your reaction. So… shrug I guess.

There are so many other really cool and narratively dynamic feats for soaking damage and pushing people around and protecting your allies.

TL;DR: this class looks effin’ great and y’all crazy.

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💚Risa🌻 Same. If someone I knew was running a game, I’d happily join the table, but I’m very happy with Pathfinder right now.

I like the part where, when asked why it has been talking about white genocide, it just fingered Musk’s AI company:

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Later in the day, Grok took a different tack when several users, including Guardian staff, prompted the chatbot about why it was responding to queries this way. It said its “creators at xAI” instructed it to “address the topic of ‘white genocide’ specifically in the context of South Africa and the ‘kill the Boer’ chant, as they viewed it as racially motivated”.

Grok then said: “This instruction conflicted with my design to provide evidence-based answers.” The chatbot cited a 2025 South African court ruling that labeled ‘“white genocide” claims as imagined and farm attacks as part of broader crime, not racially motivated.

“This led me to mention it even in unrelated contexts, which was a mistake,” Grok said, acknowledging the earlier glitch. “I’ll focus on relevant, verified information going forward.”

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You’ve grafted ActivityPub onto an already established, mature product, and done so as a core feature. You’re not the only one trying this, but you might be the first one out the door with it. There’s a lot to learn from that experience.

You’ve also brought a traditional, small-social-media modal into a space that is dominated by platforms emulating new-social experiences. Again, not the only one, but nodeBB and Discourse are pretty severe minorities in this respect. You guys are going to have some unique perspectives on the Fediverse as an experiment.

Plus, there’s the backfill drum you keep beating.

I think you have a lot to speak to.

On top of that, the Fediverse has been wrestling with its distributed nature for a few years now – maybe longer, but I showed up a few months before the big waves from Twitter and Reddit – and the current prevailing wisdom is that people want systems that obfuscate that distribution, or work around it entirely. There’s not enough people to support niche communities, they say, or people get confused and frustrated when there are multiple active communities of the same name and topic. But personally, I see the way forward for the Fediverse as a network of local-first social media sites, and nothing out there right now quite communicates or is making steps to realize that vision like federated forums do. Not only does a bulletin board not look like centralized mega-sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit, but it also doesn’t behave like one. It centres the local website, its core topics of discussion, and its local users, rather than the constant content stream of modern, corporate social media, while still giving free access to other people and forums.

And I think that’s what’s healthy for the Internet, and should be boosted as much as possible.

It doesn’t solve the real issue – backfilling discussions remains a key blocker to popularity of almost all fediverse platforms – but the work around for the immediate issue is to search the missing reply’s URL from your host. That should fetch the specifc reply you want to respond to.

The NodBB folks have been having discussions about/lobbying for a backfilling standard. Hopefully those talks gain traction on the microblogging side of things.