Pathfinder 2E Taking20 -"I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2e Because of This Issue"

[kenada]

Suggesting that his video was just to drive views (as the original poster did) and suggesting that his issue was that he was unwilling to make any changes to the AP (while making a snide dig at another poster, as you did) is both unconvincing, and a bit of a jerk move.

I’m trying to understand this particular line of discussion, but I’m failing to come up with a charitable reading. Help me not think this is not just more tone policing. Why focus on this particular comment and not engage with anything else I’ve posted in this thread? Is it just to call out that it was a “jerk move”? Yep, it was crass.

Cody is the one of the receiving end of criticism. He was the one accused of lacking sincerity.

You weren’t on the receiving side of any criticism. Instead, you made an unsolicited snide remark about @Retreater.

Huh. I certainly didn’t have @Retreater in mind when I posted that. I apologize for creating that impression, and I apologize to him even if he didn’t think it was directed at him.

Let me reiterate that I was talking about the discussion we’ve been having here for the last several months. The back and forth between the original video and the responses and the tweet all struck me as very familiar. I’m not going to apologize for making the dig. Expecting a community to respond magnanimously when one side is obviously not interested in having a conversation about the perceived problem (as evinced by that tweet I linked) is just not reasonable or fair to that community, and dealing with it can be exhausting.

Lost in all this is the point that PF2 isn’t good for all groups. I don’t think that’s really a controversial point. I don’t think even the most ardent proponent of PF2 here would contest that claim. I disagree the issue raised in this case is a systemic issue, but there’s no discourse to be had. Even if there were, then what would we conclude? That people have different tastes and like different things?

 

[Retreater]

Huh. I certainly didn’t have @Retreater in mind when I posted that. I apologize for creating that impression, and I apologize to him even if he didn’t think it was directed at him.

I didn't notice anything, and certainly didn't take any offence from any of the comments on here.

Roll20 is just really lackluster. Like, the interface is dated as hell in my opinion, especially when you compare it to Foundry. I'm not a fan of the subscription service, but if you're going to do it I think you should really have a solid user interface and options, and honestly it feels like a product from 3-4 years ago.

I agree that Roll20 is bad for PF2. We were all enjoying the system pretty well before the pandemic forced us into a VTT, and for various technical reasons Roll20 was the only option that would work for everyone. The debate for me is now that I'm pretty familiar with Roll20 (despite its limitations), should I pick up Foundry, learn all of its ins-and-outs, and hope everything works when it's a community-produced and not officially-supported VTT (knowing everything could change in a week like it did with its D&D Beyond integration)?

I read earlier in the thread (can't find the reference to quote ATM) that Cody from Taking20 was trying to run Age of Ashes "by the book." I can say from first hand experience that this can lead to a bad time. Unless you are being paid to do a playtest, regardless of the system you have to adapt to your players, change up the encounters, and add/remove content from the adventure as needed. I will go on record to say that Age of Ashes is not a great AP, and it was probably a mistake for Paizo to use it as among its first adventure products instead of a good starting adventure to train beginning players on the system.

 

[dave2008]

I think it’s mostly because Roll20 seems complacent and has probably terrible infrastructure (where the heck is night mode???). Only reason I use it is to play 4e because I see no support ever coming for foundry since the community is incredibly tiny and only getting smaller. Once I can get a group to run pathfinder 2e or other systems I’m doing everything else on foundry

It is getting so much praise, I may have to start a Foundry questions thread!

 

[Justice and Rule]

I agree that Roll20 is bad for PF2. We were all enjoying the system pretty well before the pandemic forced us into a VTT, and for various technical reasons Roll20 was the only option that would work for everyone. The debate for me is now that I'm pretty familiar with Roll20 (despite its limitations), should I pick up Foundry, learn all of its ins-and-outs, and hope everything works when it's a community-produced and not officially-supported VTT (knowing everything could change in a week like it did with its D&D Beyond integration)?

I mean, I'd say yes. First off if you are playing PF2, the possibility of losing compatibility with something like DND Beyond really not a problem since it's all on the SRD, and as a guy who is running 5E stuff on there, the guy who is currently running the working D&D Beyond module has it up in working order (or at least close enough to it for things to run for my group).

But the benefits are just great: no monthly fee, you are basically hosting all the stuff off your own machine (or you can pay for hosting elsewhere if you really want), great integration of effects and map tricks that are well beyond what you can do in Roll20. You can do flickering torches, zones of darkness, roiling fog, weird energy waves, and all sorts of neat little things. You can do weird stuff like directional sound, too; as an example, one of my games had the party in the sewers. I made up a HUGE map using the Pathfinder sewer tiles (Imported the PDF into GIMP and then saved the pages as individual PNGs) and made a little hidden crypt in a side passage. I put down zombie eating noises for ghouls, and when they got close enough, one of the party members picked it up and told them to stop. It's a really neat effect.

You also have a bunch of modules that do cool things, like multi-level tokens. So like, if you have a multi-story map where you can see down (or up), you can basically clone the tokens so that players above can see them moving around below as you move them below and vice-versa. Also can be used as a teleporter.

Really, just a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, especially if you like using maps. And most of it is fairly easy.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I can't remember if this has been posted, but this is how my brother and I looked over most of the features in Foundry. This is the first video in the playlist.



I always loved his reaction.

 

[kenada]

And the walls. If you do anything with walls in roll20, the walls in Foundry are way better. You can have player-clickable doors. You can have one-way walls, so you can have cliffs on a map. You can have walls that let you do shrubberies that block line of sight but don’t obscure the shrubbery on the map. There’s also a Dungeondraft importer that doesn’t require a subscription tier to use (because the roll20 one needs API access).

There’s also a module that does difficult terrain, so when you drag a ruler over it, it gets adjusted for the difficult terrain. Oh, and there’s module that implements darkvision correctly (not whatever weird crap roll20 does). It knows about 5e and PF2 by default, and it’ll do the right thing (e.g., stuff in darkness renders in black in white in Foundry for PF2).

I mean, I'd say yes. First off if you are playing PF2, the possibility of losing compatibility with something like DND Beyond really not a problem since it's all on the SRD, and as a guy who is running 5E stuff on there, the guy who is currently running the working D&D Beyond module has it up in working order (or at least close enough to it for things to run for my group).

Could you talk a bit more about the D&D Beyond module? I was looking at 5e support in Foundry recently (because I’m trying to figure out what to do for my campaign once we pick back up again in January), and it seemed like a bit of a mess compared to PF2.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Could you talk a bit more about the D&D Beyond module? I was looking at 5e support in Foundry recently (because I’m trying to figure out what to do for my campaign once we pick back up again in January), and it seemed like a bit of a mess compared to PF2.

So right now there are two Modules: VTTA and D&D Beyond Importer. The former hasn't been worked on in a few months because the maker became busy, so the latter came about. As far as I know it seems to be working well enough for me right now, but I haven't imported any Tasha-specific stuff, which broke the previous one. By January, I expect things to be in a better place, but I know D&D Beyond Importer is getting like, rather regular updates to fix things. I think you need a Patreon pledge for both when it comes to spells and monsters (I know at least the former, haven't do so with the latter yet).

EDIT: Sorry, gotta comment on this, too.

And the walls. If you do anything with walls in roll20, the walls in Foundry are way better. You can have player-clickable doors. You can have one-way walls, so you can have cliffs on a map. You can have walls that let you do shrubberies that block line of sight but don’t obscure the shrubbery on the map. There’s also a Dungeondraft importer that doesn’t require a subscription tier to use (because the roll20 one needs API access).

There’s also a module that does difficult terrain, so when you drag a ruler over it, it gets adjusted for the difficult terrain. Oh, and there’s module that implements darkvision correctly (not whatever weird crap roll20 does). It knows about 5e and PF2 by default, and it’ll do the right thing (e.g., stuff in darkness renders in black in white in Foundry for PF2).

Oh God, it's like night and day. You can have clickable doors, and also locked ones. You can have walls which you can see through but not go through, as well as walls which block sight but can be walked through (Good for thick brush and the like). There's also "Object Walls", which allows you to see the outline of the solid object, but not beyond it. This means if you have an alleyway map, you'll actually see all the buildings around you, rather than a narrow black hallway.

 

[Retreater]

I guess I should try to get into a Foundry game as a player to see how it functions. Fantasy Grounds ended up being well beyond my capacity to learn. I'm pretty comfortable putting maps into Roll20, and the dynamic lighting there seems to be at least serviceable for my purposes.

 

[billd91]

I guess I should try to get into a Foundry game as a player to see how it functions. Fantasy Grounds ended up being well beyond my capacity to learn. I'm pretty comfortable putting maps into Roll20, and the dynamic lighting there seems to be at least serviceable for my purposes.

I’m reasonably pleased with the new dynamic lighting controls. MUCH easier to work with.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Yep, no real interest in DMing PF2 at the moment, but I have a lot more freedom in what I chose to play. Really it comes down to who I play with I believe. I'm just hoping I can find some casual players. I'm not into character building, optimizing, team synergy / tactics. I mostly hear those are the parts people who play PF2 enjoy and I therefor will have a hard time finding players I fit with. We will see...

At least in so far as the first half of what you said (Character-building/ optimization), I will point out something that might help:

I'm actually convinced characters that do their stats correctly (which is fairly intuitive, it just involves maxing the primary stat and making sure you have some kind of AC solution in place, where the classes kind of offer obvious routes to do that in line with their classic thematic space), would be capable of achieving a surprising degree of success, even deprived completely of all of their feats (note: Feats, not Class Features). Characters with their feats are obviously stronger (and well selected feats, stronger still) but the margin feels small enough to me that I suspect they'd be able to be victorious over encounters, up to a point (they can take Moderate encounters, I think, and claw their way to victory in a severe encounter with luck and good play.) I also suspect I'm being conservative in my estimate, if the players are good tacticians.

That much of the game's actual power is loaded into the classes as things you just get for free, or contingent more on good play than character building. So I definitely think minimal attention to power when doing things like picking feats is far less crippling than it would be in comparable games (like 5e, Pathfinder 1e, or 4e, 3.5, and so forth.) You could make most, or maybe even all, of your feats 'flavor' and still pull your weight in the dungeon.