Recent content by qbalrog

Poor tactics made shadow spawn

Pretty rare for me as player or ref, and that's with playing since OD&D pre-grayhawk. Near party wipes are more common and there we just pickup and continue, with players getting new PCs and an appreciation for the ref's willingness to wipe the party. TPKs haven't happened since my high school...

My experience is that encounters are faster than 1E but not blazingly fast. Been on roll20 for the last 5 years. When I first started 2E on my own scenarios, battles could take an hour or more but I was also throwing mostly heavy encounters at the group. This is partly because my group is very...

I do think the overall lack of AOO makes the combat much more fluid, which I think is a good thing. You could argue that thematically it is too rare in 2E but the bane of 3.5 and 1E was the static fight where after level 7 or so, you had to stay put to get full damage, and the painof AOO made it...

I usually do about 3 sessions between levels, because that works with our 2-3 weeks between game and 18-24 month campaign lifetime to get us into end levels that we like. I long ago stopped rewarding individual XP and these days don't do party XP. Advancement is by fiat, with some variance...

I've been hoping for such a book. It would be assume. You can also consider another book or a chapter in the same on chases and the like.

A conversation is the best place to start but it may be need to be focused on the players and GM going their separate way. As the usual GM I can appreciate the frustration when hours of prep are not appreciated by the players who often have trouble reading a simple handout (my experience over...

As a long time gamer and most often the referee, especially for the last decade, I agree with your analysis, including the "no prep at all and wing it": it works but it isn't usually memorable. There can be external factors that get me close to burnout, generally it's when work is very intense...

I think it is because APG really fleshes the game out. It's sort of the best hits from 1E APG and 1E ARG. Most folks who like Pathfinder seem to like the customization and 2E APG really broadens the options. As an example, the archetypes before APG were of more limited appeal. APG has many to...

Wonderful to hear this! I'd forgotten about the side-car die roll for the d20 that had 1-10 twice :) I also remember the dice where you would color with wax the low and high 1-10 differently. I would not go back to OD&D but there was a wonder playing it as an 8th grading. For me first game was...

I definitely find the critters tougher than 1E. I did a session with 2 1st level PCs, partly expecting the extra hit points at first level to round things out. A second level skeleton nearly wiped them. Granted, they weren't optimized for battle but still...

Looking forward to having twice as many critters! As for the 2E skeptics, loving the system. Only real problem is that its competing with a decade of 1E content but the new stuff is rolling out. It's certainly not a 4E digression (which I played and enjoyed well enough- 2E is more like 3.0...

Thank you for the call out on the anniversary! As with you I started about age 12 but I'm older so it has been closer to 37 years that I've been playing. My first exposure to it was at West Point, where my father taught math. A friend invited me to try it out. We played in a musty basement of...