Recent content by kenada

There is, but it’s not the default. My guess is Paizo went this route as an alternate way of solving the problem with classes in PF1 that were multiple ability dependent. Instead of making it easy to attack and deal damage with your primary stat (like 4e and 5e), they give out tons of boosts...

You get tons of boosts by default. Unless you avoid spending boosts on your primary score, it’s going to be maxed out or close to it. I wish the game had embraced a wider spread of scores (to make alternate methods of score generation more feasible), but it didn’t.

I was going to reply to your first comment regarding randomizing ability scores, but this one is much more appropriate. 😂 When I was prepping for my Winter’s Daughter one-shot, I looked at randomizing ability scores. I don’t think there’s any dice-based method that will work out well for PF2...

That approach to surprise is similar to the encounter procedure in basic D&D. Neat.

The biggest thing I missed moving to Foundry was how well Hero Lab Online tracks buffs and stuff like that. It’s really clunky doing anything in HLO, but that stuff worked great once you set up all the conditions and adjustments. On the other hand, HLO could be really buggy at times, and support...

Foundry is software you download and run locally (or on a server). To collect metrics, they’d have to phone home which systems and modules you’re using as well as when you’re running sessions. I expect that would go over poorly with their user base.

Some things that come to mind: Almost everything is part of the SRD. Archives of Nethys is your friend. Pathbuilder is a good character creation app. Hero Lab Online kind of sucks. Nothing is standard like D&D Beyond. Foundry has much better support for PF2 than roll20. The community is...

Are any of us arguing that it does so out of the box? I certainly conceded in my post earlier in this thread that it does not, but it also only requires a few extra considerations to make work. It’s not like exploration in 5e, which not only barely supports it but goes the extra step of...

You should know that I’m aware how PF2 works. 😛 I picked those values because they kept the example simple. It doesn’t matter whether there are modifiers or additional hits (from extra attacks or creatures). In a real situation, a PC would be considering the totality of the battlefield. If the...

Hit probability is a thing, but if I’m a player looking to decide whether to stay or keep fighting, the most obvious thing to consider is the worst case scenario. Without crits, that’s easy. If I have 20 hp left, and I see the creature does 2d6, then I know I can definitely take one more hit. It...

It’s probably worth moving the discussion into it’s own topic since this was originally about Abomination Vaults. At the same time, I’m not sure how much legs the discussion has. I’m going to consolidate some and try to keep responses brief. I’m reminded of a conversation I had here a few...

Professor Dungeon Master did a video recently that came to a similar conclusion for 5e. Newer games are “better balanced”, but characters end up being more vulnerable. The thing that keeps them from dying outright is the death mechanics. It’s one of the reasons why I won’t institute such a rule...

I’ve been thinking about the purported difficulty of PF2. Monsters in OSE are dangerous, but it and other OSR games don’t really have the same reputation that PF2 does for being lethal. People acknowledge the lethality, but the expectations are different. I wonder how much that is at play here...

I have a question about your use of the VP subsystem. How do you handle tracking the VP (publicly, etc)? When I used it, I kept it hidden. One of the other people in my group is running Scum and Villainy for us, and I’m not sure I like player-visible clocks.

I was really hoping it was the other way, or they wouldn’t be that explicit, but alas. I’d say ignore James Jacobs and run the dungeon as a living complex. It will make the dungeon more interesting if you favor verisimilitude over just running encounters as combat challenges outside of a wider...