Recent content by Thomas Shey

Do "Seeing GMs brag about it" count? Does having sometimes leaned a bit in that direction yourself in your younger days count? If so, yes, I saw both. Maybe reading other people's claims as yelling isn't helping?

I kind of consider that an element of my note 2, but point taken.

The only time I've seen what I thought was an ineffective PF2e character was people who actively avoided what the games tell you is needed for the class you're playing; while a point or two on the roll matters, its not a game breaker. (If someone builds a character the game tells you needs...

Often its done for one of two purposes: 1. Prepaying for ancillery costs, such as when you actually want art that isn't something like public domain art, or to have editors and/or layout artists do their magic with it; 2. Prejudging demand so you know whether anyone is going to be interested...

Its not a coincidence that PF2e has made it much harder to do that sort of thing to yourself, even deliberately.

Its certainly true in some games that are actively designed for inter-player benefits. I can't speak for the current generations of D&D proper.. Though as I said, there are games that make it hard for that sort of mismatch to be severe, to the point where the first usually has to not only aim...

That's the key, of course. You can't entirely guarentee that the final result out of point distribution or even arrays will be balanced depending on other factors in the player's application. But in the end, the result is at least in their hands; depending on the system they may need more or...

Whoops, didn't realize this was a massive necro.

I don't have any single game that's my goto; haven't in years. I'm not generally a great fan of the D&D style paradigm (classes/levels/elevating hit points/etc) but even that isn't hard and fast a I'm finishing up a 13th Age campaign. But in the last few years I've run BASH UE, Fragged Empire...

Since its been bemoaned to some extent for half a century, I'm not holding my breath on the latter.

Okay, that explains why I haven't seen it, since I rarely even get a core book in physical form any more (only when I'm certain I'll be running the game).

I'm guessing this must be about wanting certain physical books that are lumped together with other material at higher tiers? Because I can't say I ever ran into a problem backing at a tier that had, say, all the digital options. I realize I may not be typical in rarely getting a physical book...

I think, though, they still don't have the advantage of people coming to them with interest in the lore already implanted. (Oddly, D&D, at least some of the settings, may be a partial exception to that because people may have read the novels before they ever played the game. I suspect that...

"Groups" is doing some heavy lifting here, however. At least in some areas "groups" could include hundreds of people who's groups overlapped, and had influence on and from other groups they interacted with with some frequency. I could have pointed out a number of trends in a number of West...

Since I come by my opinion honestly, and with as much sampling as I think was possible at the time, I'd suggest your wants here are going to be unsatisfied at least regarding me.