I usually play ranged martials. In 5e, is was basically exclusively rangers, and in AD&D2 it was a ranged fighter. I’ve always kind of played fairly timidly, trying to stay back, kite enemies, and avoid actually taking hits.

I’ve only gotten to play PF2 as a GM. My table only has 2 players, so I have a GMPC tagging along with the party. I wanted someone explicitly defensive in nature, so I originally spec’d them as a Champion. It wasn’t the best fit for who the character was supposed to be – they weren’t devote, and they weren’t in any way magical – but I made it work. When the Guardian playtest launched, I respeced him immediately.

Guardian has been a real breath of fresh air for me. Since the GMPC is there to be a meat shield, and because I’m not especially attached to him, using the Guardian as a mobile interceptor has been a lot of fun, even as I do everything to make sure he exists solely to shine the other players. Also, GMing has really helped me deal with my hesitation to get into the fray – the NPC monsters exist to be killed, and I’m happy to put them in positions to be killed.

If I ever get to a PF2 table where I’m just a player, I’m absolutely rolling another Guardian. Especially with the buffs that came with it’s official release. A utility defender is scratching an itch I didn’t know I had.

There’s a Pathbuilder 1e, but I think it might only be for Android. I haven’t seen a web-based version.

Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they’re on the ground (prone), when they can’t see where they’re being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).

Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.

It’s not available yet on iOS (though an iOS port is in development). You can find it on the web at pathbuilder2e.com. Mobile and web apps don’t sync, though. The paid versions allow you to save characters to Google Drive, which you can use to sync them.

Which version of Pathfinder? 1e and 2e are pretty different. In 2e, Fireball is on the Arcane and Primal spell lists, so it’s accessible to Elemental, Fey, Genie, Imperial, Nymph, and various Draconic sorcerers (Adamantine, Fortune, Horned, and Mirage). See the sorcerer bloodlines here.

I can’t speak to 1e.

No one complains more about a product than long-time fans of the product. They’re the ones who have had the time to feel betrayed by something, be it minor design choices, or things the owners have done, and who also feel a deep sense of ownership over the product.

Haters are just fans that feel alienated somehow, and can’t move past it.

The baker’s dozen is 13, because one of them is sacrificial.

Initiative is a contest to see who gets to act first. It’s not technically a contested check in the usual sense, but it is the only standard situation in the game where people roll against each other to determine a winner.

That’s close enough as far as I’m concerned.

>And when someone is stealthing around they use stealth instead of perception to set their initiative order. > >To stay undetected/unnoticed their initial initiative (based on stealth) is used against the others perception DC or when they use the seek action.

No, that’s the thing, RAW you do not stay unnoticed, only undetected, which means the other side knows you exist. If you beat their DC, they don’t know where you are, but they know that you are.

This is incongruent with how avoiding notice works outside of initiative rolls. That’s the point, and that’s what I think is a Bad Experience, Actually.

>I don’t know how to handle the secret nature of a stealth check in roll for initiative scenarios though.

You don’t. As buffman mentioned, Stealth-based initiative rolls are open. But secret rolls are also one of the most common things to be ejected from the game, so a lot of people outside of PFS have nothing to rectify here.

Win if you can, lose if you must, but always TPK.

I’m not up to speed on Japanese cultural or anime concepts, but I thought the idea around Isekai was that you are transported into the game/story world. So, wouldn’t that force you to play Human by definition?

Bingo. Especially when what they’ve done to trigger the comments telllimf them to “play something else” is ask how to extend the thing they already like, or to replace some subsystem that is so clealy not core to the game.

But with 5e, there are also just so many third party releases that you can also replace core systems, like magic, with little difficulty, and people know it.

They don’t want to play something else. They’re not ready to try something else. They want to keep their dragon ampersand and their dis/advantage rolls, and telling them they’re doing something wrong by holding on to that isn’t convincing. It just communicates that other games are played by fucking assholes with boundary issues.

Ok, but these discussions aren’t happening at you’re table. “Well, fuck them then” isn’t exactly helpful.

Aye. NodeBB and Lemmy have a couple of rough edges here and there.

Sute, but the thing they like is “D&D”, and D&D isn’t just a game anymore, it’s an identity signifier. Pointing people to other games before establishing yourself as firmly not attacking their identity is going to trigger a fight.

alexanderthedead@lemmy.world said in A lesson so many need to learn: > Anyone who wants to make the claim that the system is bad will have bang their subjective arguments against the steel wall that is its popularity.

Yes, but this is a thing that people want to do. They want to try and dent that popularity, and they want to shift some of it towards their own preferences. It doesn’t matter that it’s a subjective opinion on what is better or what is bad, it doesn’t feel subjective to the person interjecting.

They believe their preferred game is better, they probably have had this discussion numerous times with people who have ignored them or chewed them out for trying to evangelize, and they are infinitely frustrated that others won’t see the light.

People who leave popular things behind for niche things often just have this habit of having to bury the thing they left behind. It can’t be good. The new thing is better, but the new thing is better both because it is better, and also because the old thing was just objectively bad.

People do this with a lot of things. TV shows, ice cream flavours, toys they used to play with as kids. There’s a sense of shame attached to having liked the old thing, not just a sense of joy of having found the new one. It’s one of the reasons the people they evangelize to get so defensive: They can sense that they are being judged.

It definitely trips up people who usually just look at RPGBot to build their characters out from levels 1 - 20 before the first session. That’s how I made my build choices, and it was a pretty significant stumbling block for me when I made the switch.

The blue options aren’t always the best options, because the best options depend on what everyone else is doing.

Exactly this.

The game’s rules are, mostly, simple, intuitive, consistent, and predictable. In fact, the rules very often seem to follow from the fiction presented at the table! Sometimes, they do it too well, even – I’ve seen people complain about Trip being Athletics vs Reflex rather than Acrobatics or Fortitude, but as someone who’s taken judo and karate lessons, Athletics vs Reflex is 100% right.

The rules follow the fiction at the table, and that means 9 times out of 10, if you know the fiction being presented, you can just ask for the roll that makes sense to you. No need to look anything up.

The game is also moderately systematized, and functional. That is, a lot of what 5e DMs would just treat as “roll skill against DC” is formalized into an “Action” with a concrete name. These actions act like mathematical or programming functions, in that they can take parameters. So, it’s not “Trip”, it’s “Trip (Athletics)”. If your character comes out of left field and does something acrobatic, or even magical, that I think would cause a creature to stumble and fall, then I will leverage “Trip (Acrobatics)” or “Trip (Arcana)”, which now makes it an Acrobatics or Arcana roll vs Reflex. This means “Trip (x)” is actually “Roll x vs Reflex. On a success, the target falls prone, on a… etc.”

Super flexible, and super intuitive. But formalized, and only presented with the default option, so it looks both complicated and rigid.

I started running the game for 8 year olds, though, and they picked it up very quickly. I do my best to run sessions totally in-fiction, but that honestly gets broken every other turn or so.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

* Kichae has a stroke.

People are very bad at explaining what they like about things, because usually they like things in contrast to things they don’t like. And people who do identify what they like positively often just get told that their input isn’t welcome, either.

The problem isn’t whether someone is focusing on negative aspects of what you’re playing or the positive aspects of what they are, it’s that discussions about minority systems are often just puked up onto people who weren’t asking. The conversation is often:

“Hey, how can I do [thing] in [game I’m playing]?”

“[Game you’re playing] sucks at [thing]/isn’t designed for [thing]. You should play [something else].”

“But I like [game I’m playing], and don’t want to convert to a whole new system.”

This means not only is the asker’s question being totally ignored, but they’re being hit with – sometimes even bombarded by – value judgements they weren’t interested in.

FATAL fixes this.