ilinamorato

A great twist to this is what I call the "Garak inversion:" they're all true. "Even the lies?" "Especially the lies."

Really, your headcanon has some precedent in the books. If Wormtongue had written the history, he literally would've called Gandalf "bad news." And in fact, Saruman's actual name was Curumo. ...uh, or Curunir. Or Sharkey, or Tarindor, or...

I mean, part of the problem is that every person (and place, and country, and river...) has like a half dozen names depending on who's talking and what time or place they're in. Gandalf himself is Greyhame, Gandalf, Stormcrow, and Lathspell in Rohan alone; and Mithrandir, Olorin, Incanus, and Tharkun to other people in Middle Earth.

Aragorn and Strider and Elessar and Estel and Wingfoot and Longshanks are the same person in different contexts. Galadriel is also Alatariel and Artanis and Nerwen. Legolas is Laicolasse and Greenleaf (all three of which, in fairness, mean the same thing in different languages).

And that's before we even talk about what their names "really" were in the "original" Red Book of Westmarch, before Tolkien "translated" them to English. The "actual" sound that came out of Bilbo's mouth when he introduced himself was Bilba Labingi, but Tolkien decided that the name Labingi "actually" would've sounded like the word for bag or sack to the "original hearers." Likewise Frodo's name is "translated" from Maura Labingi and Sam "actually" introduced himself as Banazir Galpsi.

Not "nearly." That's actually his name in the "pretranslated" language that the book was "originally" written in, within the fiction.

That makes a lot of sense, thinking about it. With a bronze, you can say, "well, I had a really rough day, but even still I managed to eke out a bronze." But with silver, you're tempted to say "...but could I have done 0.2s better and got the gold?"

That's awesome. I haven't gotten my head around a swashbuckler myself, but the ones I've seen play definitely feel like they're "of a kind" with gunslingers.

It's worth noting, too, that the gunslinger "way" that you choose will define a lot of how the class plays. My pistolero's quick, seemingly careless gunplay will feel very different from someone who builds a sniper and is much more methodical and sneaky.

It's more formalized than Fate, but absolutely. There are feat trees, even entire classes that make that their whole deal. Buffs, special moves and tactics, AOE debuffs, heal spells that target a different number or area of creatures depending on how many actions you use to cast them, the whole thing.

Paizo just released "Battlecry" last month, and the new classes in the book would be terrible for a solo game: the Guardian (literally a big sack of hit points with high AC, but with special powers to force enemies to attack them and only them) and the Commander (a class that the RPGBot guys called "Dual-Wield your friends!" because they have, among many other support actions, an ability that lets them give one teammate the ability to shove an enemy toward another teammate, who can then hit it. On the commander's turn.)

But every character can use the Aid action, which is very powerful, and often worth sacrificing an attack for; especially if your multiple attack penalty is at -10.

PF2e tries to have it both ways:

• If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit.

• If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss.

• Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit).

• Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail).

In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D.

But when you're out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe not, and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it's time to run.

Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.

Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it's a pretty elegant system.

And as we all know, Nintendo suffered for their terrible decision. /s

I mean, yeah, it wasn't the most consumer-friendly choice. I'm just saying I get why they made it.

I have never seen that happen in PF2e printed adventures. A lot of the time they use monsters straight out of the Bestiary without modification, and when they don't they usually put the statblocks in the back of the AP so that they can all be referenced from wherever they need to be.

I just pulled down my copy of "The Enmity Cycle" (the closest Paizo adventure I have at hand). It's a level 4-6 adventure published in 2023. I haven't read it since shortly after I bought it, but the encounters go like this:

• The first encounter is with 4 bandits, and it references the Gamemastery Guide directly for their statblocks (though you can also get them on AoN). There is a note about a change to their favored terrain and what skill they roll for initiative (in PF2e, you can roll different stats for initiative depending on what you're doing; usually it's perception, but in this case, the bandits roll their stealth for initiative). It also notes their tactics (they try to threaten the party before attacking, and if you kill or capture two of them, the other two flee). This is standard for any encounter.

• The second encounter is with two sand wolves, the stat block for which is printed in the back of the module.

• The third encounter is with four gnoll hunters, taken straight from the Bestiary, page 178. If this were a more recent, post-OGL book, it would've referenced the Monster Core instead (page 208).

Then the party enters a temple (read: dungeon). Here the encounters are themed, but they don't pull any shenanigans like you mentioned. There are encounters...

• with two Scorching Sun Cultists (stat block inline with the adventure, mechanically and visually distinct from previous enemies) and a Filth Fire (Bestiary 2, page 110);

• with three cultists (this refers GMs back to the statblock printed above);

• with two cultists (again, reference back to the previous page) and a named priest of the cult (who is similar to the cultists, but also has some unique features befitting his position);

• with an atajma (an undead cleric monster who honestly looks super cool; reference to Book of the Dead p112, though I can't find it on AoN for some reason), and two more cultists;

• and an elite poltergeist (reference Bestiary, page 264). "Elite" is a template you can use to make a regular poltergeist more scary, so in fairness that is a way that they could do what you're saying, but they don't here.

That's the end of chapter one. Characters are supposed to level up around this time. In chapter 2, you fight:

• four elite nuglubs;
• a named jinkin boss;
• elite jinkin mooks;
• Usij cultists;
• sand wolves;
• several Scrapborn;
• two Scrapborn with the "weak" template;
• a named Ceustodaemon;
• a clockwork soldier;
• and a named gnoll priestess

...in various configurations, both before and in the dungeon. All of the enemies here refer to the same statblocks each time they appear, with the exception of the ones that have the "weak" template (which is like the "elite" template above, but in reverse). The sand wolves are the only repeated monster from chapter one, and they seem to be used as a power level indicator to show how much stronger you are, so they also appear with the same stats.

In chapter three there are more sand wolves and more cultists, some new creatures, some creatures that have been seen before, but none of them are reskinned soldiers dealing suspiciously different damage.

That was fun, incidentally. Makes me want to run this adventure I bought two years ago. Alas, the enemy of every campaign is the schedule.

It wouldn't have been just an NES chip. It would've had to also include a separate PPU (in addition to the two already in the SNES), a NES cartridge I/O slot, a whole different video out architecture (the NES didn't support composite out), and maybe more. Those are just the ones I know for sure.

Besides, the SNES was already going to cost significantly more than the Genesis. They were wary of widening that price gap still further when the owners of the older system still owned the older system and could easily plug it back in. Further, they were launching the SNES in North America with five launch titles and eight more on deck over the following month, with a total of thirty games coming out before that Christmas. I don't think they were worried about having enough content for people to play on that new system.

They ripped it out because their "backwards compatibility" was literally just grafting an NES to the SNES. I think it even had a toggle switch you had to flip between the two. It was going to make the thing cost tons of money and nobody was ever going to use it, and anyone who cared could just plug their old NES back in whenever they wanted to use it.

But the people who didn't upgrade never got to play Star Fox. Man, I love Star Fox.

The companies that produce these games have increasingly co-mingled their staff with video game studios

Like who?

I mean, in the case of D&D, maybe. But PF2e was written by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Mark Seifter; they have a combined zero years of video game studio experience between them. In fact, most of them have been making tabletop RPGs for literally their entire professional careers, including stints at Wizards of the Coast.

For fun, I went to the Pathfinder wiki, which has brief profiles of all of the authors and contributors to Pathfinder; and I can't find a single person on any of the game's recent sourcebooks that has worked for a video game company before working for Paizo. In fact, most of them have worked for Paizo in some capacity for 5+ years, or are freelancers who have worked for big tabletop RPG publishers for ages.