#pf2e attack

[dndspellgifs]

Moonlight Ray

3rd level evocation

Divine, Primal

(pathfinder 2e)

we are all going to be ookay some day i promise

stingray blast

[literalliterature]

[ID written by the artist @ultrasopp : stylized drawing of the northern lights. bright green “waves” drawn in thick lines cover the upper left corner of the drawing. the rest is a dark blue sky filled with stars. End ID.]

guess i'm some kind of freak: a laika borealis playlist

(yes it's another TTRPG OC playlist yes she is named after the space dog)

[Spotify]

01) 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty) -- Emperor X

the radiation that the change implies/can kill, and that's a fact

02) Look Who's Inside Again -- Bo Burnham

when you're a kid and you're stuck in your room/you'll do any old shit to get out of it

03) The Mind Electric -- Miracle Musical

scattering sparks of thought energy/deliver me and carry me away

04) Mariella -- Kate Nash

i'm heavy-handed/to say the least/my mother thinks i'll be an awful clutcher

05) Just a Girl -- Florence + the Machine

oh, i'm just a girl/take a good look at me/just your typical prototype

06) Next Up Forever -- AJR

this is my imagination/this is how it looks and sounds/but i gotta go so much bigger/so they can never shut me down

07) Brass Band -- Jukebox the Ghost

boredom is a gift/but i've had enough of it to last a lifetime/give me something shocking

08) Second Child, Restless Child -- The Oh Hellos

and they saw trouble in my eyes/they were quick to recognize the devil in me

09) Numb Bears -- Of Monsters and Men

far across the ocean alone/while numb bears at home/said i could never get there/but i'm already there

10) Haven't You Noticed (I'm a Star) -- Olivia Olson

haven't you noticed i made it this far?/now everyone can see me burning

11) I Like That -- Janelle Monae

but even back then, with the tears in my eyes/i always knew i was the shit

12) Scrawny -- Wallows

if i'm offending them i don't mind/maybe they all should listen to me/it isn't all about what you see

13) Problems -- Mother Mother

i found love in the strangest place/tied up and branded, locked in a cage

14) Blah Blah Blah -- The Oozes

get out of there/you don't deserve that chair

15) Carnivore -- Bear Attack!

you took my heart and ate it/but i won't be your victim/can't take it anymore

16) Saint Bernard -- Lincoln

you always said how you love dogs/i don't know if i count, but i'm trying my best/when i'm howlin' and barkin' these songs

17) Never Love an Anchor -- The Crane Wives

it's a secret i keep tucked inside my chest/with this heart of mine that's guilty, not remorseful

18) The Mind Electric -- Chonny Jash

it seems those beams of light have caused some glare/freakish and dismal, hollow and bleak

19) Neighborhood #2 (Laika) -- Arcade Fire

when daddy comes home/you always start a fight

[astrmastr]

a certified Little Shitass Monster(tm) for my Bird Themed Pathfinder Game About Birds

[warlordfelwinter]

aster is finally hitting things this game and in fact she just did 53 damage in one hit

[aeondeug]

Sustaining a spell I think works better in PF2E than in 5E but I do think that casting kind of sucks in its action economy. Most spells cost 2 actions and many are fairly specific things. You also don't get terribly many of them. This can be supplemented by scrolls and wands, but you need a gm who is willing to supply you either enough gold to buy all that shit or a bunch of scrolls and wands. I'm only ever really having fun as a caster in PF2E if I have 4 or more actions. I feel horribly constrained by PF2E's balance and rules.

They're reworking some of the casting classes though, so I'm hoping that helps fix the issues I have with PF2E's combat as a caster. The changes they're making to the oracle's focus spells and focus spells in general are a huge fucking relief. They'll mean I'll actually want to use them while still retaining the whole "You need think of WHEN to use them in combat" thing oracle has going on. Even then though I still feel like I'm going to be bumping into the frustrating reality that a lot of spells cost 2 actions and have extremely specific use cases or just feel so underpowered that my old reliable needle darts until dead is simply the safer option.

I think the only magic system I've gotten my hands on that isn't a freeform narrative thing that I've really felt free with has been the one in the fanmade Zelda TTRPG Reclaim the Wild. It's a point buy system so you're not trapped with class restrictions. If you want to have absolute dogshit stats outside your casting ones and 20 spells you can do that. The entire spell list is also yours. And if you want feats or the non-magical techniques that run off stamina you can do that too.

There's also how these work in combat resource wise. Actions you have a standard, minor and free action setup common to many games with spells being a standard action. But where I think things are really interesting is that it abandoned the vancian spell slot system entirely in favor of an MP system. Sustained spells in the game bind a set amount of your magic points. For free you can choose to drop these and you're only really limited by the amount of MP you happen to have or any stipulations an individual spell's rules text gives you. Besides this you can either spend MP or burn it. Spent MP is restored after every combat. Burnt MP requires rest or a potion. And speaking of potions, you can drink potions to restore it in combat. This helps limit your ability to cast constantly, while still allowing you to cast pretty freely and it also rewards prepwork.

And because it's Zelda a lot of the monsters are puzzle based in nature. So things like the weird niche spells that might otherwise only be used outside of combat in many other game have combat use in RtW. Which helps alleviate the feeling of "I am only ever casting eldritch blast/needle darts". You also get magic tools (albeit many of these your gm will likely make).

The end result is a system where I felt I was getting good use out of all my spells and where I felt mostly free to actually use them. It does have issues. Magic songs kind of feel a bit underbaked unfortunately and because the system is so puzzle focused this does mean you need a good gm who can build those kinds of encounters and dungeons. But when it came to playing a caster I was very happy all around.

i dont like the concentration mechanic in bg3

i end up not using the majority of my warlock spells over just casting either hunger of hadar or hex + eldritch blast every turn bc you can basically only cast one spell at a time

so many of my spells feel useless or not as good as hunger of hadar or hex or too situational to give up concentrating on those 2 spells

i literally have haste and call lightning and greater invisibility and never use them!!!!

[svenskkaktus]

LvL up in @SpookyStirfry pf2e campaign! Lime the Leshy not only have seedpod attack but now she can spit acidic nectar. She is a dangerous bush.

[thecreaturecodex]

Squirming Swill

Image © Paizo Publishing, accessed at Archives of Nethys here

[Another monster from PF2e's Bestiary 3, and one of my favorites from that book. I like a monster that's simultaneously gross and pathetic, a monster with a unique treasure and a monster with a connection to the world, and this hits all of those notes. I could easily see this being either an ooze or an undead, but it's undead in PF2e so I kept it that way.]

Squirming Swill CR 2 NE Undead This thing is a greasy mass of organic matter studded with more recognizable organs and bones occasionally rising to the surface. It smells overpoweringly of rot and char.

Cauldrons are among the most potent tools of a witch or a hag, but they should be cleaned regularly and carefully for fear of consequences. Squirming swills are among those consequences. They are the burnt and greasy remains of things overcooked in a magic cauldron, animated by leftover magic and given a dim, malign intelligence. Once able to move under their own power, they pull themselves out of their incubators and start to roam.

Squirming swills are usually hostile to humanoid creatures, trying to kill them with sizzling pseudopods and jets of hot grease. A creature that closely resembles their creator may instead be “adopted”, with the swill viewing them the way a neglected pet may treat a prospective new owner. Squirming swills often approach small animals looking for companionship, but tend to scare them away or lash out and kill them when the creature revolts at its new friend’s slime, heat or smell. A squirming swill is also happy to befriend a small animal carcass, toting them around the way a child does a beloved toy.

Due to the magical energy involved in their construction, the remains of a squirming swill retain useful properties. The liquid from a squirming swill’s body can be squeezed out to generate a random greater minor potion. A creature that uses this potion must succeed a DC 13 Fortitude save or be sickened for 1 minute.

Squirming Swill CR 2 XP 600 NE Small undead Init +3; Senses blind, blindsense 60 ft., Perception +5 Aura wretched stench (Fort DC 13, 1 minute, 15 ft.)

Defense AC 14, touch 14, flat-footed 11 (+1 size, +3 Dex) hp 22 (3d8+9) Fort +3, Ref +4, Will +4 Immune undead traits, visual effects; Resist fire 5 Defensive Abilities amorphous

Offense Speed 20 ft., swim 15 ft. Melee slam +6 (1d10-1 plus 1d6 fire plus slippery grease) Ranged scalding oil +6 touch (2d6 fire)

Statistics Str 9, Dex 16, Con -, Int 1, Wis 10, Cha 15 Base Atk +2; CMB +0; CMD 13 (cannot be tripped) Feats Toughness, Weapon Finesse Skills Acrobatics +5 (-1 jumping), Perception +5, Stealth +12, Swim +7

Ecology Environment any land or underground Organization solitary, pair or banquet (3-12) Treasure special (see above)

Special Abilities Scalding Oil (Ex) A squirming swill can fire a jet of hot grease as a standard action. Treat this as a ranged touch attack with a range of 30 feet and no range increment. A creature struck takes 2d6 points of fire damage. Slippery Grease (Ex) A creature struck by a squirming swill’s slam attack must succeed a DC 13 Reflex save or fall prone. The save DC is Charisma based. Wretched Stench (Su) A creature can make a save to recover from a squirming swill’s stench as a move action on its turn. If the creature succeeds at this secondary saving throw, it vomits and the vomit joins the swill’s mass, healing the swill 3 hit points. The save DC is Charisma based.

[monstersdownthepath]

(sorry if these 2e-leaning questions are a bit off-topic for what is a 1e-centric blog, and i'll refrain from doing so again if it does bother you,) but have you taken a gander at the suite pf2e monster core dragons?

------

I have! And already, I like them significantly more than the basic dragons from 1e. I'll be steadily sprinkling them into my 1e games from here on out.

I actually have a hard time picking which one I like the most design-wise, but powerset-wise, it's no contest:

The boneless, shapeshifting Conspirator Dragons have the ability to immediately shift their forms out of the way of incoming attacks, compress themselves into spaces as though they were liquids, and create entire hollow shells of any creature they've ever seen and pour themselves into it to gallivant around the world as someone else, for good or for ill.

Design-wise, I love the body horror portrayed here, both subtle and overt; fleshy tendrils, limbs that are far too flexible, arms that jut out of its chest rather than emerging from the same joint as the wings, what appear to be human hands at the tips of the wings, and of course a human face as a draconic crest. What's not to love?

[theaggressivewriter]

Pf2e Boss Monster Design

The tight math of Pf2e allows for encounters to be built swiftly and without worry, and the same goes for homebrew monster creation. One problem with the system, however, is the boss monster. Creatures with high level stats against a group of players can feel like a slog if the players are unable to reduce the creature's AC or saves enough for damage/cc to go through. It normally takes a lot of items and tactics for a normal group to take a creature down that's 4 levels higher than the party's level (or a +4 monster), and even creature's 3 levels higher (or +3) can still feel like a slog depending on their stat block. If you're designing a boss fight, consider this one trick I've learned over the past 2 years of GMing with the system:

Lie to your players.

For different systems this could mean a lot of things, DND 5e famously is known for its GMs secretly increasing the hp of a given monster behind the screens. But for Pf2e it's less a blatant lie and more of a performance. Rather than throwing a +4 or +5 monster, you could instead throw a +1 to +3 monster and accompany them with either other creatures or traps that you present to your players as that monsters abilities. Let's make an example.

Is your monster a fire breathing mutant bear that is killing other wildlife in the area?

(Art by Deftspex)

Easy. Let's make it an Elite Black Bear (making it L3), then add a Fire Mephit (L1) to the initiative, making the combat a Severe encounter for 4 level 1 players. What does this do, and how can we make this convey what we want?

Mechanically, the Black Bear acts as the base monster that the players can target and kill and the Fire Mephit acts on its own initiative, but what you do is tell your players that it's the bear doing what the Fire Mephit is doing. The bear is the one moving and its base health is the health your party is trying to take down to 0, but the "Fire Mephit" acts on its turn as if attached to the bear. It still takes damage if hit by an aoe, but must otherwise be specifically targeted by an attack rather than the Bear itself (you should give your players some sort of heads up or a description of something that can be targeted in order to remove the ability from initiative, like pointing out that breaking its jaws would remove them on a successful recall knowledge).

What this does is a multitude of things, your solo boss monster technically has more action economy without breaking the math, your players have more tactical choices to make between getting rid of the Bear's fire related abilities, and it should make your players shit their pants from seeing a fire breathing bear.

I have a lot of other tips and tricks for boss monster design for pf2e, due to my notorious one shots being considered "Dark Souls" by many approving players. I'd like to one day turn my knowledge into a published book alongside templates, some homebrew monster designs, and some variant rules, but due to legal concerns will need to wait until I have a lawyer to assist me in understanding what I'm getting into.

[adhsea]

You should give Pathfinder 2e a shot

Given the state of everything surrounding WOTC and OneD&D, I figured that now was a good time to make a post like this. I know how things like this sound, so I’m going to promise up front that I’m not here to shit on D&D. I played 5e for years and had a lot of fun with it. This is a message from someone who decided to try out PF2e and found a new favorite system, and thinks you might enjoy it too. So without further ado, here’s a few reasons to give Pathfinder 2e a shot:

Tactics and Teamwork: Combat is incredibly rewarding in 2e. Every character has 3 actions, and abilities are balanced with the idea of each action being just as valuable. Attacking multiple times a turn imposes a penalty, so it's important to figure out what you can do besides attack in order to help your party members do great on their turns as well. Attacks of Opportunity are rare, so moving into a flank position is easy to achieve. You can use skills to learn about your enemy, frighten them, knock them into the ground, it's a lot to put in one tiny snippet. If you've wanted more dynamic and tactical combat, why not give this a shot?

Balance part A: This game is incredibly well balanced on pretty much every level. The math in this game is built around the crit system, where every roll that's 10 or more above the DC is a critical success, and every roll that's 10 or more below the DC is a critical failure. This means that even as the numbers get higher and higher, they're still consistent. As a result, encounter building is simple and can be easily adjusted to fit the challenge the DM wants to give the players. It's trustworthy and reliable math that rewards tactics and good playing.

Balance part B: The martial vs caster disparity is much less of a problem in this game. Spellcasters can’t trivialize encounters with a single spell slot, and martials can feel like they have an impact on fights. For some people used to playing spellcasters, this can feel like a huge nerf. There are ways to play blaster casters and do it well, but for the most part casting is balanced around versatility and support. Martials on the other hand are stronger than in any other sword and sorcery system I've ever seen. Seriously if you've never played a martial character because you've felt they're too boring or don't have enough of an impact on the game, try one out in this system.

Character Building part Classes: As of writing this post, there are 24 unique classes to choose from in the game. 12 were released in the core rulebook, and 12 more were slowly released over the game's 4 year life span. They're not done either, there's another class coming in late summer. 2e is a game that tries to make as many character concepts possible as it can. Will you play an Investigator trying to solve crimes, an Oracle who struggles with a divine curse, and Inventor trying to create the perfect weapon, or maybe a Magus studying to deliver powerful spells through the might of your blade? The possibilities aren't endless, but they're not stopping until they might as well be.

Character Building part Ancestries: Also known as Races in D&D, your choice of Ancestry is a more impactful choice than you might expect. At various levels, you'll earn meaningful Ancestry feats that allow you to define how your character's origin shaped them. Your dwarf might've spent so much time around a forge that things like fire and smoke are easier to handle, while your goblin friend might have such a fascination with fire that they get a small bonus to doing damage with it. You can even get versatile Heritages to further define your character. Have you ever wanted to play an elven tiefling, or a gnomish aasimar? There's a lot that you can do to make your character feel truly yours.

Ease of Access: All of the rules are available for free online. Legally. This isn't a piracy statement Paizo literally makes the rules freely accessible without having to spend a cent. There's a ton of tools made by the community available online to help you play too. Pathbuilder is a great character builder that's available for free. The Archives of Nethys for 2e have the rules from every single published book available, even adventure paths. pf2easy is another great catalogue you can search through and filter. I could go on and on. The only time paizo ever really insists on payment are the prewritten adventures, which is completely understandable. And speaking of which.

The Adventure Paths: Paizo's prewritten Adventure Paths are great. They're available in physical copies or pdfs, always in sets of 3 or 6 books, with the 3 book sets being adventures spanning 10 levels and the 6 books spanning 1 to 20. They're written with making things as easy for the gm as possible in mind, and you can expect them to be mostly prepared for player approaches to problems. And hey, if the campaign goes off the rails before you finish the first book, you don't have to buy anymore and can just keep things going however you want. If you're just starting out, the Beginner's Box is a great way to get introduced to the system. It comes with simplified rules and prewritten sheets to teach you the basics if all the rules feel like too much to wrap your head around.

I'm cutting myself off because this post is long enough, and I'll just keep on writing run on sentences if I don't. If you've made it all this way, I hope I've convinced you to try out 2e. It's an incredible system that more people should know about. You can sometimes find people willing to run the beginner's box for free online, and there's no shortage of people willing to help answer questions about the system. And if you're willing to take the plunge right away, I'll leave you with the Rules Index on AON. Just click the tab that says Core Rulebook, and boom you have access to everything you need to get started. Good luck and have fun.

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Do we know what’s being measured for the 8ft for the Ether Spiders? Because “furthest front leg to furthest back leg,” “tip of their pedipalp to the end of their abdomen,” and “from the ground to the top of their body” are very different versions of 8ft and I could see it being any one of those

Good question! It'd be legs or abdomen, and there are arguments for either but I would guess leg to leg. In PF2e while lengths or heights are often given, everyone's size categories are lists of how much space they take up. In other editions of PF and D&D base this on height (a 30 ft long dragon and 30 ft giant are the same), but PF2e bases this exclusively on physical space they occupy (a 30 ft giant tree person only takes up a 10 ft by 10 ft space, but has longer reach than normal on attacks). So it can't be 8ft at the shoulder. tip of leg to tip of leg is standard for spiders, and also it would likely occupy a 15 by 15 foot square instead if it was abdomen.

[toghrahkunok]

Not making a post about every class because wow that'd be long (and heck apparently Swashbuckler getting extra skill boosts slipped under the radar, who knows what else's been missed), but I at least want to make a post covering the coolest parts of

The PF2E Alchemist, Remastered (which is not out yet, just leaked from early copies!)

Infused Reagents are gone.

From the ground up: You start every day with Advanced Alchemy giving you 4+Int free Alchemical Consumables of your level or lower. You need the formula for anything you make, but the fun part is that you only need the lowest-level version of that formula. Only have the recipe for a level 1 Lesser Alchemist's Fire? Who cares, that's still enough for your level 17 Alchemist to make a level 17 Major Alchemist's Fire.

Quick Alchemy (QA), then, is now fueled by Versatile Vials (VV). You get 2+Int of them every morning, and can use QA to turn them 1:1 into no-shelf-life Alchemical Consumables like you used to be able to with Infused Reagents. They still need to be immediately used then and there, and have a new restriction that anything with a duration longer than 10 minutes gets shortened to 10 minutes. The twist is that you can spend 10 minutes in exploration to recover 2 VVs (3 at level 9), repeatable as much as you want up to your max of 2+Int. You don't even need to specifically spend your time on that, you can just passively get 2/10 minutes with no imposition on whatever other Exploration task you wanna do. The final cherry on top? QA gains a secondary function: It allows you to make a temporary VV that last until the start of your next turn, although you can't QA again to turn those "Quick Vials" into other Alchemical Consumables. What's the point then?

Oh yeah, Vials can be thrown as acid bombs (d6 damage +1 splash, scaling 1/4/12/18 like normal bombs). Every subclass also gets an expansion on them! Bombers can change the damage type to Lightning/Cold/Fire, and at later levels can fill them with metal shavings to make them trigger precious material weaknesses (i.e. you can throw Cold Iron Fire Vials at a Fey). Chirurgeon can feed them to allies to heal those d6s instead of harm, or in a pinch just bean them over the head with a healing vial from 20 feet away. Mutagenists can drink them to suppress the drawbacks for a round if they're under the effects of a Mutagen, and later even get some free physical resistance from that. Finally, Toxicologists can apply them to a weapon as a poison, and I feel I should also mention that Toxicologists now get to ignore poison immunity.

There's a few other big changes: Master in Bombs, Simple Weapons, and Unarmed Attacks at level 15; permanently Quickened at 17th level to use QA (only to make a single Quick Vial, no benefit from level 9 Double Brew with this action); Powerful Alchemy at level 5 making every Alchemical Consumable you make from your class use the better of it's own DC or your class DC; Additive feats no longer increasing the level of the items you use them to make (which before often prevented you from using Additives on you more powerful items); heck basically every feat is better in at least one small but not insignificant way so it's hard to really cover. For anyone who wants to get the more specific details, check out Ronald the Rules Lawyer's video (the best and most consolidated source of all the changes), or if you just want to read about it I can send you the relevant screenshots (too many to fit into a reblog).

Overall, Alchemist now gets at-will alchemy (infinite Quick Vials), per-encounter alchemy (2+Int Versatile Vials), and daily alchemy (4+Int Advanced Alchemy). With QA limiting the duration of items you make with it, you only get to exploit the hour-long duration items with your limited supply of Advanced Alchemy, which is going to number a lot fewer than what the old Alchemist could do with their whole "doubling/tripling Infused Reagents" thing. Still - the 10 minute duration on QA combined with the 10 minute interval to restock VVs means that you basically get 2 (3 at level 9) indefinite ongoing effects of your choice.

My thoughts? This is the biggest glow-up I've ever seen! There's so much more for you to do both in and out of combat, to the point where I'm slightly concerned. With the formula convenience explained at the top letting you diversify instead of constantly needing to get more recipes just to keep up the formulas you already have, you can easily end up with basically every single Alchemical Consumable at your fingertips. Move out of the way Spell Substitution Wizard, we have a new master of having-the-perfect-tool-for-every-job.

[makapatag]

so hear me out right (and this is by no means a smart blog post thing, im just rambling at 2am)

a lot of combat heavy ttrpgs (D&D4e, PF2e, ICON, Lancer, Panic! At The Dojo) rely a lot on keywording and mechanical definitions to create this interlocking (and hopefully well-oiled) combat engine that rewards good tactical choices and forward thinking. 4e needs you to know that Ranged Attacks Provoke Opportunity Attacks, and so you need to move away first to avoid that (often by spending their Move action to Shift). this goes for other games as well. ICON needs you to know that if an Ability does not have the "Attack" tag then its explicitly not an attack, even if it deals damage. This is important because some classes and abilities benefit from not attacking, such as the Demon Slayer

the far end of this is PF2e, where almost everything is Keyworded. Classes, Races, even Feats have keywords, and some keywords have Keywords in them. this is not bad design in my opinion: mastery of this keywording can create for some really cool effects (and you can feasibly design something very BotW which also depends on a lot of interactions between elements).

now consider that so much of tactics trpgs (that is, Traditional/Tabletop Role-Playing Games) rely on so much of that interaction to create fulfilling scenarios. most of the time this is because tactics rpgs also depend on build-crafting. there are a lot of tactics trpgs that don't really care about build crafting or has less of a focus on it to focus instead on the grid combat: games like Rune, Valiant Quest, maybe even Blood Neon, so im explicitly talking about the variety of tactics trpgs that are build-centered: basically anything that comes from the vein of Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons

one of my favorite parts about TTRPGs is that you can play them based off of the fiction. writing Gubat Banwa, I understand that sometimes you have to create that fiction, especially if its not one thats well-represented. the created fiction or genre is the blueprint from which the play-fiction arises during the game: that's the fire-like collective imagination that arises from play.

There's a design and play philosophy (common among OSR, PbtA, and FitD) known as Fiction-First. This means that you follow what happens in the fiction first before the mechanics or anything else. Not to preserve the integrity of a "narrative" but rather, to preserve the integrity of the fiction.

What would a Fiction-First Tactics TRPG look like? This is something I tried to set out to do with Gubat Banwa. I haven't really succeeded, as of 1e.3.

so i've been thinking lately. What if a game was Fiction-First? It would work similarly to the Keywording of PF2e, but more open-ended in its interpretation.

Look at the Panabas from PF2e (a weapon present in SEAsia! From the Malay Archipelago all the way to the Philippine Archipelago). It has the Forceful (your second attack on your turn gains +X (X = damage dice, third up gets +2X.), Sweep (+1 to attack if youve alr targeted a separate character), and Two-Hand d10 (roll a d10 when you wield with both hands) tags.

I'm not going to be translating these one for one, but let's use the fiction-first style of writing and mechanics i'm concocting:

Panabas. A heavy blade. Using this, you strike with Bravery. The forward-curving blade can chop through tree, bone, and bramble.

Heavy Blade is a weapon type, so this is classic keywording. The text afterwards is also keywording: striking with Bravery means you roll your Bravery stat when making attacks with it. All well and good: there's always going to be some classical keywording in there as necessity (its this entanglement of mechanic and fiction that's made me love PbtA anyway).

The later text is more important, because say then I made an enemy like:

Walking Tree. A tree that uproots itself, and whistles to kill victims. Made of wood, so they lose 1 Stamina when they suffer chopping attacks. If they're struck by flame, they start burning. [Insert other combat-important stats here].

Now the fact that the panabas can chop through trees interacts with the description of the walking tree being vulnerable to chopping attacks.

Now these really aren't too different from the concept of keywording (really they're in the same concept park), the different thing is two things:

You can now apply that chopping quality to anything in the fiction. Find some brambles on your way, maybe even brambles as hindering terrain? Then spend a Beat to attack it to remove it! That's fiction first after all

It's easier to understand just at first glance with just natural language.

The important part here is natural language. In Play, a lot of the time, my players love picking up on little things about lore-bites of the items and techniques they have and seeing how that can apply to the fiction. So this is more of that: weapons, items, techniques, armor all become things that establish fiction. When two fictions interact, a new fiction arises!

Burning: A status effect. While you're burning, lose 1 Stamina when you start your Break. You lose burning when you're doused by water or you take time to remove it. Improvise: (A basic action). Do anything that does not inherently harm, as long as it makes sense in the fiction, and doesn't take more than 4 seconds to do (Beats take up 4 seconds). You can use this to stop drop and roll to get rid of Burning. Deep Water. -1 Elevation. Water reaches up to your shoulders. Moving into deep water costs +1 Speed.

Of course there's still going to be mechanical descriptions there, we're not going for FKR full just fiction thing. We're just blending fiction into the game part. Even PbtA still has stats and rolling and mechanics to further support their fiction.

I wanted to write this so that techniques and other widgets can be written with fictional wording in mind, and that wording would affect how its used in tactical grid combat. A technique that says: "You are surrounded by a barrier of tornado-force winds. Any attack from outside your adjacency is swept away, unless it cannot be buffeted by winds." Becomes a mechanical thing: perhaps a spell of concentrated curses pierces through this, but not arrows or weak fireballs?

The Arbiter

The last piece of the puzzle will almost always be: who arbitrates the fiction? There almost always needs to be a final word. For GuBa, this is the Umalagad, not so impartial arbiter. For Solo Play, this is still the Umalagad, but as the oracle: they ask a question, ie, "Would this area of effect attack be buffeted by the wind barrier if the origin point starts from outside?" and they would roll a d10. On a 6+, the answer is no, the target would not be buffeted because the flames overwhelm. On a 5-, the answer would be yes, it is buffeted because the target is not the brunt of the attack. And the final answer becomes the ruling for the rest of that scene.

Last last thing is this particular rule that sets things down that I might put into Gubat Banwa:

The Law of Phenomenon Pay close attention to the words that you have. These words will decide whether your blade can chop down a tree, or your abaka weave blunts edged strikes, but susceptible to piercing spears. These words will decide whether your dazzling spell can daze opponents, or if the opponent you fight ignores it due to them not depending on their senses to fight. The words establish the fiction. The fiction is the world in which your characters live: follow it always.

[balketh]

Third game of our new first-ever PF2e Campaign: Oblivion Deep.

(I don't recap every sesh/post heaps about it, but I've tagged it uniquely if you wanna mute~)

I'm a player; custom setting of DM's design, second campaign in this world. First campaign was 5+ years in 5e, ended with my Warforged Arcana Cleric accelerating the heat death collapse of the known universe while outside it, so he could use the unlimited potential of the early magic of the new empty universe that appeared in its place to bring the old universe from the past forward, but with a few slight alterations to how Time and Entropy work. (He a thousands-strong spies'-murmur Simulacrum hivemind user - he was literally starting to see the limitations of the universe, always contained within six second intervals. He was starting to see the Ruleset as the underlying problem of the whole setting, and so his end goal was to change it. And he did. To PF2e.) In our current game, I'm playing a Kashrishi (short psychic crystalhorn rhinoman, cool as SHIT) Alch Studies Investigator. Real sherlocky/batmany type. We've been dumped out of the playable intro cutscene - our trial-at-sea ship being attacked by a kraken, after we managed to successfully exonerate ourselves, no less - and murdering the crew trying to steal the lifeboat... So we could take it ourselves.

We were dumped out of this onto what I'm now guessing is the Tutorial Island Dungeon - an island wreathed in shadow, a world plot connected situation that we cannot easily escape from, and likely must solve to handle.

But I say tutorial island dungeon, because, so far, the two games we've spent on this island have been:

grappling with the very powerful but woefully inconsistently designed FoundryVTT (some things: drag and drop, works every time, flawless. others, of the same complexity: you need three modules and a custom bit of code and even then, it's only 80% of the desired solution.) Today it proved its worth by letting us undo a hugely misinterpreted enemy ability that was ruining the fight

we have mananged to kill 1 (one) grippli archer. This would have gone much better (and did, after fixing), if the DM hadn't been using its special multi-attack ability without any Multi-attack Penalty. One of us was still downed, in spite of that.

Rolling like absolute dogshit. I, rolling with +8 at level 1, have only hit, I think, one target, once. If it weren't for the benefit (and sometimes strong drawback) of Devise a Stratagem basically letting me 'preroll and decide' before wasting my attack action, I'd have been the most useless- oh, wait, I have been the most useless member of the party in combat so far; I've literally critically failed MOST of my attempted non-attack combat actions. I think the FoundryVTT roller just hates me.

It's taking a LOT of getting used to; we're definitely improving, but we're still very much in the run-up-and-attack mindset of 5e, and it shows, because a single grippli archer was such a fucking problem for us.

Ugh. Ah well. We actually started getting somewhere, so, things are looking up.

Can't wait to get out of this fucking Shadow darkness, though. Only one member of our party has Darkvision. Shit suuuuuucks.

[warlordfelwinter]

man foundry hates me

[safelynte]

Found another one of these new TTRPGs 🤣 And it's got a lot of green flags

Levels are separated into tiers, with higher-tier characters getting more actions. Similarly to how nice Slay the Spire energy goes up by chapter. Which hopefully means more amazing combos as you go up.

But attacks require a major action. So you can only ever have one big attack. And only your first attack deals bonus damage for going over the enemy's defense. This first-attack bonus is a psychological mirror to PF2e's multiple-attack penalty.

Each player character has a spirit guage, which is a ramping resource. On the other hand, enemy elites/bosses will have a danger gauge to ramp.

Enemy statblocks are open books once the target is recognized, similar to Lancer. (Lancer scans cannot fail, but initial analysis in this system is a free action. So both are fairly efficient actions.) And enemies have falter (bloodied) effects, similar to 4e. But these effects go two ways. Some effects may make enemies fight harder, while other falter effects open up opportunities for PCs to execute monsters. As the execution effects are unique to each monster, the way your players finish off enemies depends on the encounter as much as their build.

Executed enemies lower the enemy's morale guage and award spirit to a PC. But in a wild twist that I did not expect, GMs can have faltering enemies retreat to save morale for other enemies and deny spirit to PCs. It is both tactical from the GMs standpoint and realistic from the enemy's standpoint.

You can also grant spirit to allies. A very dangerous mechanic, as it could lead to intensified quarterbacking. But it is elegantly offset by the cost of 1 spirit for each transfer.

Similar to 4e recoveries, healing effects are powerful, but a character can only be healed once per day. They get the medicated condition to note this.

Captain/boss enemies also have one-shot safety nets. 😅 Pretty good idea to have these with captain status, rather than as part of a normal statblock. So you can have a captain and non-captain version of the same enemy.

Interestingly, a normal player character here has an HP bar, Resolve bar, Mind/MP bar, Spirit gauge, 2-tier action gauge, and grid position. Which is a lot of overhead. But as I've polled on my tumblr before, not an impossible-to-swallow amount.

The grid/zone system allows shared spaces. There is no indication in the video as to how size and reach work in this game. But it seems ranged characters can reach one at least zone over. And there are attacks of opportunity (oh no).