kichae

Wherein the Summoner nee Druid finally gets to show his nature knowledge!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J2-iv_pm5QM

Over in the basement, prolific poster u/Killchrono asked the question: What encounters have you enjoyed the most in PF2e?

The answers given are interesting and insightful (a lot of them focus on terrain, twists, and knife-edge scenarios that broke in the players' favour), but they're also over there. I'm curious to know what the Fediverse's favour encounters have been!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw3UoN6ZWu4

Utkarsh posted this video to his Patreon last week, and I've been looking forward to folks' responses to it since. It's good stuff! Give it a watch.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the balance mandate in Pathfinder 2e -- thoughts and feelings that seem to go against a trend in the discourse around the game. Thoughts that often get me labelled an unquestioning white knight of a fanboy.

I've gotten to actually play very little PF2e, as a player. Like 90% of my experience with the game has been as a GM -- originally a trepidatious and uneasy GM, unilaterally pulling my table away from 5e after the OGL nonsense a few years ago -- so I have to admit that my pain points have been very different from many players.

But I've come to identify those players' pain points not as the system, but as their GMs. At least for the ones who I think have valid frustrations. I've come to understand that a significant number (a minority, I hope) of Pathfinder 2e GMs functionally run the game as if they are just a computer code interpreter. Too many people are seeing the robust support the system gives them and, apparently, deciding that they don't have to do any actual thinking.

"The spell/feat/action does what the spell/feat/action does, no more, no less" is a common thing I see said, as I look on in horror and disappointment, realizing that a lot of my peers in this space -- both GMs and players alike -- get their fun from bureaucratic middle-managment. And while their fun is valid (as is yours), they seem to think that I should be getting my fun from the same thing, and worse, that pages spent on anyone else's fun are just "bloat".

But what came out of this video -- or, at least, the comments on the promo post on Reddit -- is that a lot of vocal complainers are really just feeling aggrieved because they want to be more powerful than the other creatures at the table, players and enemies alike.

u/Killchrono put together a really good response about the bitter feelings that opened my mind to some folks' feelings about player-dictated power scaling. Or, rather, the lack of it in the system.

I get that this is a big part of what power-gaming was in 3e (and therefore in PF1), and to an extent what it is in 5e, but I have always found this element of the games to be kind of gauche. I mean, I totally get it from a theorycrafting perspective -- I like puzzles, and build optimization is a kind of puzzle -- but bringing this kind of thing to an actual live table says a whole lot about someone as a person (assuming, of course, it's not an explicitly gonzo table). So the fact that the designers decided that Level was going to be the measure of character power in PF2, and that that measure was going to be as accurate as possible has been a huge gift to me. Theory-crafters get to keep their lane, but their monster trucks don't get to squish my little Honda Civic, as it were.

For a while now, I've had this feeling that a lot of complaints about "balance" were coming from a place of players being used to break the level curve, but not being able to be honest with themselves that they are, in practice, playing a character that is 2-3 levels higher than everyone else around them. This is not a popular opinion among those who feel held back by the game's guardrails, of course, but the hollowness of their push-back has kind of solidified my feelings on the issue.

But I was not at all prepared to see people crawl out of the shadows to say, out and proud, that they resented not being able to be more powerful than others at the table. And, while it was only a handful of people being so brash and mask-off about it all, they came fast, and hard, and kind of all over the place.

To plagiarize myself from elsewhere: I was totally blindsided by some people popping in to say the quiet part loud: that they should be allowed to be the main character if they know the magic cheat codes.

It's going to take me a little bit to shake that one off.

Victory Points systems often feel disconnected from the core game experience. SBG discusses some possible reasons why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnzUVjjQPYY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-u5JRijFY

Narrative Declaration runs several Pathfinder 2e-based Actual Plays, most notably its flagship show Rotgrind. This is an animation of a scene from one of their episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j25U6F9t0w

SBG talks about why so many people get cranky about the Wizard, and how assumptions about what makes for good and bad adventure design impact players' perception of Prepared Casters in PF2e.

Spoiler: The big factor is whether people actually prepare for their encounters or not, and whether they're even given the opportunity to do so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOLNLAXakY4

A good and fairly short discussion on new player expectations when it comes to slotted full casters, and class baselines.

Pathfinder lead designer Jason Bulmahn has launched his crowdfunding campaign for Hellfinder, a modern post-apocalyptic horror hack of Pathfinder 2e:

From the Backerkit Campaign Description: Welcome to Hellfinder, a Modern Horror Hack of Pathfinder Second Edition. This game takes the basic rules of Pathfinder, replacing specific mechanics to transform the experience from a high fantasy adventure game into one filled with mysteries, dread, and terror, a game where your agents might see things that can't be unseen and face a fate far worse than death.

In Hellfinder, you will take on the role of an Agent, sent to work in the basement of the Bureau. After months of drudgery, you finally get your first field assignment, to close an abandoned Field Office in a sleepy town in the middle of the north woods of Wisconsin. But things are very much not what they seem and this tiny town might hold secrets darker than any found in the farthest reaches of the unending forest.

Hellfinder starts by focusing on one central story, created to introduce you to the world and the horrors it contains. That story is broken down into three chapters, each of which contains new rules and the next part of the story. At the start of play, you only open the first packet, containing character creation rules and the opening chapter of the tale. The other packets will only be opened when you reach a specific moment in the story... for better or for worse.

Hellfinder replaces the traditional class system with a more free-form Agent specialization and training system. Most of this is done through spending allotted points based on your choices and some free points to reflect your hobbies and interests. As you level up, you'll get more of these free points to build out your Agent as you see fit. All options are open to you, if you are willing to pay the price.

Finally, Hellfinder adds a system for Stress, to measure how much your Agent can handle mentally before succumbing to the pressure and horror they are witnessing. It also includes a system for both Physical and Mental Trauma, which add lasting injuries and challenges to Agents who have pushed beyond the breaking point. Taken together, these systems will measure how much punishment your agent can take before succumbing to the darkness.

The game's designed to live in a binder, so there's little difference between a printed-off PDF and what would arrive in the mail if you bought the physical product. The campaign's already reached its funding goals. It wraps up on 19 August.

This just came across my feed from Mastodon, and I thought I'd pass it along. Dead Unicorn TTRPG Club is trying to get a multi-system adventure up on Backerkit, and needs people to follow the project for it to get the green light.

Dead Unicorn said in I wrote a pretty great #ttrpg fantasy adventure and would love to share it with the world.: I wrote a pretty great #ttrpg fantasy adventure and would love to share it with the world. Your support would be greatly appreciated as I need 80 followers to get the project up, so please check out the link and follow the project. It's for D&D, #pathfinder2e & #cypher @ttrpg https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/9e5aa0a4-49b2-4336-a862-28f33006dc66/landing

The adventure's description from Backerkit reads: City in Starlight is a TTRPG fantasy adventure about an ancient, long dead, war between the powers of light and the powers of shadow and those that wish to reignite it. It begins humbly at a fun carnival where the PCs compete for a magical prize and ends literally in the stars as they try to save a civilization from destruction.

Check it out and give it a follow if it sounds interesting!

Redditor r/The-Magic-Sword has been diligently covering the Paizocon panels, as is their custom, live-blogging them in... uhh... GDocs. Links below!

Paizocon 2025 Keynote Live Write-Up

Paizocon 2025 Hellfire Crisis Live Writeup

Paizocon 2025 Starfinder Release Starmap Live Writeup

Paizocon 2025 World of Lost Omens Live Writeup

Over on Reddit, u/Duck_Suit has announced a Google Docs-based tool for quickly filtering spells based on mechanical criteria and casting options. Currently, it's supporting Rank 1 spells, but they intend to flesh it out up to Rank 10.

Seems like a decent little offline resource for caster players.

Original post below:

I love playing spell casters, but the honest truth is that there is an intimidatingly large number of PF2e spells and there is currently no great way of filtering those spells or directly comparing them. Having so many spell options should be an awesome part of the game, not a un-parsable barrier.

For this reason, I have been developing Keth's Spellbook:

https://sites.google.com/view/kethsspellbook?usp=sharing

The spellbook allows magic users to quickly filter spells based on essentially any mechanical criteria, heighten spells and adjust casting options, and create personal spell list.

I have had a lot of fun making and using this resource and I think you will enjoy it as well. Please visit the website above to check it out for yourself! Consider leaving feedback here or at the bottom of the website so that I can take it into consideration for future versions.

Note: The beta contains all 227 available Rank 1 spell and cantrips from the 4 standard magic traditions for the PF2e remaster, though I plan to include all spells to Rank 10 in the future (including class-specific spells and Starfinder 2e spells). Be on the lookout for updates to the spellbook!

Note: I know and love Archive of Nethys. In fact, every spell in the spellbook has a link to its AoN entry for reference. However, I think that this spellbook adds to what is available on AoN and is not redundant with it. Spell filtering on AoN is a bit obtuse in my opinion.

cross-posted from r/Pathfinder2e

TL;DR: Turning the difficulty slider down can give a different experience that is still fun!

Let me start by saying I love PF2e. It's not perfect but its my favorite high fantasy system that I've played and the main group I play with has been running 2e for a few years now and it has entirely been run in the DMs homebrew world (so no APs). All encounters are made by the DM.

One thing I noticed after a while is that my experience was different than the experience of others based on posts in this sub. A lot of the discourse focuses on "the value of a +1 bonus" or "Spellcasters aren't actually weak" or around how to optimize or use teamwork to deal with severe encounters. All of which is super interesting but I think might be scary to a new person whos curious about the "vibe" of PF2e (particularly folks who might be emigrating from 5e). Its my understanding that a lot of this discussion came about due to some of the early APs being overtuned and kind of requiring optimizations and strategic thinking so I think its helpful to have those discussions for people running those types of campaigns but I wanted to offer a perspective from the other end of the difficulty scale.

As I said, the table I play in is a homebrew setting and the campaign is entirely the work of our lovely DM. The story is interesting, our characters are fun, and the encounters are interesting but... the difficulty very rarely rises above moderate. Early on when we were first getting used to the system there were a few encounters in the hard range that I think caught us off guard and the DM dialed back the difficulty and since then as never really ramped it up much other than for the occasional boss at the end of an arc. Most encounters also lean towards the "lots of lower level dudes" as opposed to "one big monster" which I think also contributes to the difference in tone.

At first I was kind of leery of this cause I enjoy some crunch and tactics (as do most of the people at the table) but I now realize that it's pretty liberating. Knowing that I don't need to squeek out every possible bonus really expands the options available. When optimizing there tends to be options that are just flat better than others (this is far less an issue in 2e than in other systems, mind you) and if you're expecting to run into a severe encounter then "every +1 matters" becomes really really true. Choosing to take a suboptimal feat or spell or choosing to do an interesting but tactically unsound action can become real liability. But when you know that you can still pretty reliably hit even without flanking for offguard then you can start doing funny stuff without holding back your party.

This is especially true for spellcasters. I don't think spellcasters are underpowered in 2e, but I do think that there are a lot of spells that sound cool but mechanically just don't do enough. Well in our campaign, since everything tends to be lower level, suddenly those incapacitation spells start working as you fantasize them working. Hordes of mooks make wizards feel like gods again without overshadowing the "boss" encounters.

On the other side of the screen I feel like this also made things a bit more fun for our DM. If winning or losing fights aren't as uncertain then you can start adding in extra variables without the fear of going to far. There was a point where I noticed that he started to get a lot more creative with the combat arenas. For example one fight was against a group of goblins all PL-2 or less. On paper probably a moderate encounter. But the fight took place on a series of suspended platforms over a bottomless pit, where everyone needed to hop from platform to platform. The goblins had a mix of shooters and bruisers who were trying to push us off the platforms. There was tension, there was drama, and there was silliness which made for an extremely rememberable encounter even though in hindsight the actual risk was relatively small.

Most of the "Drama" comes from the sandboxy nature of the campaign. The choices we make outside of combat tends to have the biggest effects.

In summary, this is just a post that says the difficulty slider can be turned down as well as up and the game is still fun. I've played it both ways with various groups and I see the benefits of both.

I really liked this post by u/Slavasonic over on Reddit. Not only does it reflect my own experience running a beer-and-pretzles game with childen (a pop-and-chips game?), but it's actually not been down-voted into a smoking crater, which means it's probably doing something to connect with people that I've not yet figured out.

As my table continues to evolve, I've become increasingly enthusiastic about 2e's effectiveness in more casual games, and as a story engine for narrative and character-driven play. It provides a full "physics" engine in the box that I can tune to my heart's desires. The result has been really great, and discussion of it has gotten a ton of pushback by the community over on Reddit.

Edit: NodeBB seems to be hijacking the blockquote formatting, so I'm switching to horizontal-rules to encapsulate the quoted post.