kichae

Ooo, sounds like a coven of Seneschal Witches from Pathfinder 2e!

HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO US?!??!? Don't you know it's game night??

Just bring your doctor to the session. Do you think he'd play a Cleric?

You guys play D&D? I thought people only ever played the Scheduling Conflict game.

It's polished looking, and it has a lot of plugin support for TTRPG GMs.

As a markdown hater, I primarily use Trilium Notes for organizing my prep and taking session notes. I've built a digital GM screen with my players' key stats that I keep in my main tab, and then each encounter for the session is loaded into tabs before the session starts.

I use Wonderdraft for my world maps, and pull most of my encounter maps from free 'sample' maps from map makers on Patreon (which I sketch out on my battle map in dry erase marker). For city/town/village maps, I use watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator.

I pull most of my statblocks off of pf2easy. I also used pf2easy's spellbook to help me make physical spell cards for my players.

stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com I was going to do this to my table. We only have 2 PCs currently (my wife and stepson), so I gave them a GMPC guide who was supposed to be the BBEG in disguise.

But they came to love the GMPC, and I can't do that to them, so now he's just their pet human.

Including my comment on the video here:

Pathfinder 2e gets hit with the "rules-heavy" label a lot, and I find that that is a term that predispositions people to see a lot of what's written in the source books as hard-and-fast rules that are specific to the game. Now, I'm by no means going to argue that PF2e is rules light*, but rules-heavy getting thrown around as the antonym of rules-light style gaming introduces something of an unfair and *unhelpful bias.

From where I sit, Pathfinder 2e is a systemic game, rather than a "rules-heavy" one. Aren't all rules-heavy games systemic in nature? I don't know, I haven't played them all, but of those that I have, yes. But some of these games have a thousand bespoke systems that interact poorly; others have a significant number of highly detailed and complicated systems that don't share DNA; and some have a small number of fairly simple systems that interact well to create complexity at the table.

PF2e sits closer to the latter, without quite reaching the mark.

Here's the thing that often gets overlooked when people discuss PF2e's rules, in no small part because so much discussion about the rules boil down to "this is what this particular rule says, the rules mean what they say, and you should follow the rules". Everyone keeps focusing on the tree bark; they're several steps away from seeing the forest: The overwhelming majority of "rules" in the various xCore books are just codifying how people have been running d20 games since 3e launched, if not earlier. They're not novel, and they're not particular to the game, they're just written down using systemic language, while guarding against bad-faith rules-lawyering. That's it. They gave that CHA check everyone rolls while trying to charm someone a name, and included some guidance on how to come up with a DC in a systemic way, and everyone lost their damn mind.

The various Victory Point systems are no different. They're just clocks. They're just reputation points. They're just ways of abstracting away named actions. They're things GMs have been doing for 25 years now, written up with a little bit of structure and formalism, using a style guide that a lot of the audience finds intimidating or alien. And, unfortunately, the fact that a lot of the stuff that's hung off of the game's core pillars (level standardization, 4 degrees of success, DCs from bonuses/no opposed rolls, multi-tiered proficiency, and modular character design) are just codified community tradition means that they don't always interact meaningfully with the core systems.

It doesn't help that a significant fraction of the game's audience really does just seem to be here for combat, though. I mentioned on [SBG's] Patreon how people complaining about niche skill feats grind my gears because so many of the complaints boil down to "but the designers are supporting somebody else's play!!!", and we can say the same thing here, too. It's just that here, that support kind of boils down to some pocket game modes that haven't been properly tied into the core.

If you pick feats in a vacuum, based on how impactful you expect them to be in the mean average of all sessions across all tables, sure.

But you probably shouldn't pick feats that way. They should either be an expression of your character concept, or a reaction to the campaign you're currently playing.

brian@lemmy.ca The die doesn't know it just rolled a 1. History doesn't matter to it.

> if it’s being uploaded, then it means the community likes it

That really isn't how the Internet works at all. Someone uploading something just means that that person likes it. It's not like they're uploading based on the collective psychic demands of the rest of the community.

And jerking off is better with some lube. Doesn't mean this is the place to show off the pics. What you do in the privacy of your own home, or at your own table, actually isn't especially well correlated to what someone else might be interested in hosting for you.

Believe it or not, you can release written content without professional art. Used to be done all the time. Deciding you want to skip ahead in your progress as a publisher and use tools that have been built off the back of unconsenting contributors doesn't entitle you to someone's platform.