Pathfinder 2E PF2E Gurus teach me! +

[Staffan]

Not sure if the following is a rules question, a setting question, or even a social encounter question:

How does a Wizard "buy" new spells during downtime?

To learn a spell, you use the Learn a Spell exploration activity, and you must have the spell in writing or someone who can teach it to you. Note that if you learn the spell from a scroll, that does not consume the scroll. There are no rules I know of for how much getting access to the spell costs, but you could use half the scroll price as a guideline (which would be the same as buying a scroll, learning the spell, and then selling the scroll). There are also costs for the learning process itself, as explained in the link.

The same rules are used for e.g. clerics learning uncommon/rare spells.

 

[Gammadoodler]

• Melee gish

With the way attack and armor bonuses scale, this is a difficult concept to pull off using the core caster classes (likely on purpose) after the first few levels.

The Magus is probably the closest, but the full caster that is also a deadly melee combatant isn't really a thing in PF2e.

 

[Velderan]

So Foundry is definitely the way to go for VTT? Does Roll20 work decently?

 

[Thomas Shey]

4e and 5e have this kind of stuff too. For example, the 4e "Bloodied" condition and the 5e "Psionic" tag, dont have mechanics in themselves, but other mechanics can refer to them.

It just needs to be clear, when a flavor text clarifies there is actually no mechanics, but there can be mechanics elsewhere relating to it.

I agree, reducing complexity as much as possible ("but not simpler" than that) is an important goal.

And "possible" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. You can always simplify a set of game mechanics more; the question is what you sacrificed to do so and is it worth it? Often there's a price in either mechanical engagement, character representation, or game balance and how much those matter is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[payn]

So Foundry is definitely the way to go for VTT? Does Roll20 work decently?

Folks vastly prefer Foundry and from what I heard its not much of a competition when it comes to PF2.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How easy is it to play different settings in P2?

How baked in is the Golarion flavor into the classes and rules, in practice.

For example,

The stereotype of Nordic peoples as the "fur-clad raiders" Ulfen is uninformed and a bit offensive.

Also, I am less interested in the gods scene, and the core Cleric class seems to require it.

What do P2 players do for non-Golarion settings?

Its hard to easily answer this. There are certainly parts where you're going to need to do a bit of work to use some material, but its not prohibitive. As I noted up above, we're playing currently in a 3PP adventure path with its own implied setting, and the GM has just let us extend the setting as needed to cover any ground.

There are a few ancestries you'd need to rework. Personally, I'd find the hardest part constructing proper ancestry feats that are well balanced for new or substitute ancestries. The rest is mostly trivial (the clerics do require some definition on the gods, but that shouldn't be surprised for a priestly class that has any texture to it at all).

 

[Thomas Shey]

In my experience, while our campaign is set in Golarion, almost none of the core class or racial features have explicit setting correspondence.

If it'd been set in fantasy Philadelphia, I think the impact on character creation would have been negligible (assuming you're cool with elves, dwarves and goblins being residents in fantasy Philadelphia).

Its less true with some non-core material, though. As I noted, some of the more unusual Ancestries are more Golarion-specific.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The canonical (ironically) solution for people who want to cast divine spells without worshiping a deity is to be an Oracle instead.

Or a divine Sorcerer, though I've heard some complaints that's one of the weaker sorcerer takes (I don't have enough context to say why).

As for ethnicities and rules connected to those: there are some ancestry feats, mostly in books in the Lost Omens product line (the Golarion setting). I don't think there are any in the core books.

I haven't noticed any, partly because Golarion elves, dwarves, gnomes and so on are, in practice, pretty conventional for the D&D-sphere.

 

[Thomas Shey]

With the way attack and armor bonuses scale, this is a difficult concept to pull off using the core caster classes (likely on purpose) after the first few levels.

The Magus is probably the closest, but the full caster that is also a deadly melee combatant isn't really a thing in PF2e.

You can make it work after a fashion with a wizard or sorcerer with an Archetype Dedication to a fighting class, but unless its its a free archetype game that's not a cost-free option.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was also going to comment on something someone earlier in the thread about the reputation being that GMs like PF2e better than players do. I think there's a couple reasons you see this frequently and it has everything to do with the fact that most players and GMs hitting the game system aren't tabula rasas and are often familiar with either 3e era D&D or PF1e.

1. At the GM end, those games become progressively a pill to run at higher levels because of the compounding accumulated bits many opponents have that you need to keep track of. Except to a limited degree with spellcasters, PF2e avoids that, and its a pretty noticeable difference.

2. At the other end, players have sometimes gotten used to one of three things that are either less or not true with PF2e: A. Being able to bake a cake during character generation and/or advancement so you breeze through opposition, B. Being able to run a character on autopilot, C. Spellcasters that are, frankly, often OP compared to other classes. Its genuinely hard to completely cook a character in PF2e (and requires some effort to wreck one), the system almost always requires paying some attention in play, and spellcasters and non-spellcasters have been pushed closer together which required the reduction or elimination of some easy-win cards some people got used to. If any of these three apply, the system can take some getting used to at the least, and if players were really comfortable with any of the three, can come across as unpleasant. As mentioned, if the level of opposition is not comforting you can adjust that a bit (but its going to be in a way that doesn't hide what it is) but the others are not likely addressable in ways that wouldn't break the system.

My opinion is neither of these would be as pronounced to people who come in entirely from outside the D&D ecosystem or were new to RPGing in general.