Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Ghostse]

The issue with the PF stacking bonuses is both the opposite and the exact same problem of 5e pushing too many things through the same mechanism.

3e was great because it provides so much space to bolt on whatever mechanics you want. 3e it also terrible because while there is so much space to bolt on anything and everything, when it comes to combat there is really only way for those bolted on mechanics to manifest: the number you rolled on your D20, or the number you are trying to get larger (or smaller).
You can add whatever your want, but unless you work out a whole separate mechanic, your bolt-ons can only interact through the die result.

So PF has the opposite problem 5e's of attempts to model situations being pushed through a small number of mechanics like A/D, Concentration, or Bonus Actions. There are so many little fiddly things you can do in PF to try to raise and lower numbers, to affect the odds of success, and PF mechanics to cover all of them.

But the way that problem manifests in play is that when you boil it all down, everything comes to that number on the D20, so all those mechanisms work out just trying to move a number up or down.

This is why you end up with bonuses almost 3 times the maximum die result.

Which by itself isn't all that bad, the problem is they set the DC of mundane tasks where by mid-teens just your stacked bonuses are high enough to perform feats that stretch the bounds of reality.

 

[p1138]

Which by itself isn't all that bad, the problem is they set the DC of mundane tasks where by mid-teens just your stacked bonuses are high enough to perform feats that stretch the bounds of reality.

Hilariously PF2 in a way makes this even dumber. The "Earn Income" downtime action allows crit fails(miss the DC by 10), and the starting DC for a "task level zero" is 14. So if you roll a nat 1 which would already be a failure, it's a critical failure.

Critical Failure You earn nothing for your work and are fired immediately. You can't continue at the task. Your reputation suffers, potentially making it difficult for you to find rewarding jobs in that community in the future.

So any PC or NPC likely has a 5% chance to just get fired from their job and this is likely to happen once a month(figure they work 5 days a week and 4 weeks in a month) just based on basic odds, and have it become more difficult for them to find work every time. And this would apply to just serving grog or whatever the fuck at the local tavern.

They didn't fix this shit either with their "core" update that they didn't want to call 2.1 or 2.5 or whatever either. Who the fuck at Paizo thinks anyone actually wants this shit in a game?

 

[The Ugly One]

So PF has the opposite problem 5e's of attempts to model situations being pushed through a small number of mechanics like A/D, Concentration, or Bonus Actions. There are so many little fiddly things you can do in PF to try to raise and lower numbers, to affect the odds of success, and PF mechanics to cover all of them.

But the way that problem manifests in play is that when you boil it all down, everything comes to that number on the D20, so all those mechanisms work out just trying to move a number up or down.

This is why you end up with bonuses almost 3 times the maximum die result.

Which by itself isn't all that bad, the problem is they set the DC of mundane tasks where by mid-teens just your stacked bonuses are high enough to perform feats that stretch the bounds of reality.

This also arises from a game design mentality that you should build a comprehensive world simulator and just let player actions emerge. D20 + bonus vs target pass/fail just isn't a very granular or interesting action resolution system. It also conveys meaning poorly. How much more powerful is someone with a +25 bonus compared to someone with a +21 bonus? +5 seems a lot more powerful than +1. +25 doesn't seem a lot more powerful than +21, but when you're in a game with linear DC scaling, and the typical task DC has gone from 10 to 20, it is.

 

[BlazikenLover]

I think D&D 5e is a decent system, my main issues with it have to do with the balance: As a DM I initially struggled with encounter balance, monster CR is not that great of a metric to meassure power since two monsters with the same CR can end up being vastly different strength wise; the initial formula to define how many monsters you needed for an easy, medium, hard, etc encounter needed was convoluted, later on people made tools and wotc themselves made easier formulas ( one CR 5 monster = four level 5 PCs). Even then encounters can end up too weak or too strong.

As a player I don't like how constrained or weak some classes feel, often I would feel obligated to pick a certain subclass since the others weren't options or lacked support: Warlock for example, pact of the blade sucked for a very long time and chain lacked invocatioms so I felt tome was the only option. Then hexblade was released as a 'fix' for bladelock and if you wanted to play a bladelock you had to be stupid not to pick it. Thats another thing I don't like, their refusal to go back and actually update or fix things since they did not want to invalidate prior printings.

It has already been mentioned but bonus actions is another thing that sounds good on paper but in practice it is a mess since some classes like ranger have several things competing for their bonus action while other classes have few things and others have NOTHING. They should have taken a long look at that and rebalanced what things were bonus actions and which should be a once per turn for their One D&D/ 5e 2024 but nope, that was too hard. This is why I like the PF2e three action system, you dont have bonus, free or move actions, they are all actions and if you want to use them all of them to attack or move you can do it, no need to rely on things like multiple attacks or dash actions.

 

[The Ugly One]

I think D&D 5e is a decent system, my main issues with it have to do with the balance: As a DM I initially struggled with encounter balance, monster CR is not that great of a metric to meassure power since two monsters with the same CR can end up being vastly different strength wise; the initial formula to define how many monsters you needed for an easy, medium, hard, etc encounter needed was convoluted, later on people made tools and wotc themselves made easier formulas ( one CR 5 monster = four level 5 PCs). Even then encounters can end up too weak or too strong

5e has too many ways to blow up damage rather than attack mods, and the 1st run of monsters were HP sacks that, it turns out, still weren't bloated enough, and the save system is kinda fucked, as the higher level giants will practically auto-fail DEX saves, high level fighters will constantly whiff WIS saves, etc.

This is why I like the PF2e three action system, you dont have bonus, free or move actions, they are all actions and if you want to use them all of them to attack or move you can do it, no need to rely on things like multiple attacks or dash actions.

I like action points as long as the designers can resist the urge to screw with the action economy via feats and class abilities, which of course Paizo can't.

 

[CrunkLord420]

Anyone have recommendations for a free/lightweight drag-tokens-around-and-scribble app? Been using Excalidraw, I only wish it had layers.

btw I hope you guys don't actually pay money for text.

 

[Zeftax]

Anyone have recommendations for a free/lightweight drag-tokens-around-and-scribble app? Been using Excalidraw, I only wish it had layers.

When we played online with some friends a few years back, we used maptool. It was really feature rich, so if it being lightweight is a must, it's probably not ideal, but completely free and self hosted.

 

[The Ugly One]

Anyone have recommendations for a free/lightweight drag-tokens-around-and-scribble app? Been using Excalidraw, I only wish it had layers.

The free version of roll20 is fine.

btw I hope you guys don't actually pay money for text.

VIM Premium Edition?

 

[Ghostse]

Anyone have recommendations for a free/lightweight drag-tokens-around-and-scribble app? Been using Excalidraw, I only wish it had layers.

Obligatory Maptool shill.
If you are just wanting a map software for when you are playing with yourself, you won't need the online bits.

This is why I like the PF2e

You had me completely believing your post as serious until this. Well played.

 

[p1138]

This is why I like the PF2e three action system, you dont have bonus, free or move actions, they are all actions and if you want to use them all of them to attack or move you can do it, no need to rely on things like multiple attacks or dash actions.

Yeah that sounds great except for doing a third attack you're at MAP -10 which basically means it's never worth bothering with. Additionally there's still reactions(of which you get 1) and free actions to cause players to hem and haw over what they want to react to or not, plus the actions that actually take 2 which still limits what you're doing in a round. It's more diverse in what it allows, but realistically not by much. This becomes even more of an issue once you start getting more actions and reactions from feats.

And oh god the feats. PF1 had problems with feat taxes, but shit usually at least scaled. PF2, you pick a feat and then need to continually pick the next version of that feat otherwise it ends up being useless.
General feats
Archetype feats
Skill feats
Ancestry feats
Class feats

Class feats, just build them into the fucking class. Same with skill feats. Why the fuck are ancestry feats a thing? Oh right to try and make "race" a non issue. And the archetype feats don't do anything except let you take feats from yet another list.

Winged Warrior
Source Howl of the Wild pg. 82
Nature provided wings to certain creatures to help them soar above predators or reach food hanging from tall trees or the side of a cliff. When those graced with wings no longer have to depend on flight for survival, their appendages can be turned to a different use: combat. In addition to granting strategic elevation over foes, wings provide a variety of combat advantages.

Winged warriors are found independently among several ancestries. While awakened animals seem able to use these techniques as if by instinct, tengu of the Inner Sea region are the most commonly seen practitioners of this fighting style. Naval and pirate crews in the Shackles particularly value a tengu’s skill at boarding actions. Warriors able to take flight, even temporarily, can often name their price when joining a crew on the Fever Sea. Despite the ranged armaments available on most ships, many sailors are hard-pressed to defend against skilled aerial assailants.

Even those who develop wings later in life, like certain surkis and those with grafted wings, can learn the fighting style of a winged warrior. Although it’s a long path, many of the techniques involved are reinvented, rediscovered, and even updated by individual warriors.

So you waste a feat slot on that and gain nothing, except gain another 15 feats to pick from to replace class feats so you've got a ton of selection... for only 11(actually 10 because you blew your first one on the archetype) class feats available to you, so now you're missing out on the normal class feats that should have just been built into the class in the first fucking place. PF2 has the appearance of choice, but it's actually pretty damned limiting in what makes sense to do, resulting in an even greater likelihood of a novice player just making a shit character and having a miserable time... moreso than PF1 because those problems were usually based on stat distribution or obviously shit class archetypes that someone could spot at a glance and warn them about. Instead it's just more fiddly bullshit.

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

In the same vein of people not wanting to buy from people that hate you, CY/BORG's Rule 0 is literally that you're not allowed to play if you're not a communist.

My favorite cyberpunk type campaigns are ones where the PC's are cops, and believe it or not, they can still be free thinkers and buck the system from within it.

 

[p1138]

My favorite cyberpunk type campaigns are ones where the PC's are cops, and believe it or not, they can still be free thinkers and buck the system from within it.

Hell my favorite character from a Shadowrun game was a guy that eventually betrayed the entire party in the end(the other players didn't have an issue with this and some kind of expected it, the DM was basically counting on this to happen) because he spent half of the runs in the campaign treating like them a test for a job interview for a mid tier role at a AAA megacorp(that the party had been interacting with to an unusually common degree), got it and then retired from shadowrunning to do corpo security against and managing outsourced shadowrunners.

 

[Halbschwanz]

I've played mid-level and high-level Pathfinder. Static bonuses kill the game. Every modifier adds mental bloat and slows the game down. A +2, that's nothing. When a turn ends up as "I attack, +2 for flank, -2 for off hand, +1 for the duel wield feat, +2 from the paladins aura, is the bard singing? that's +2,.." and then a player jumps in about how he forgot to add the aura bonus last turn so his attack would've hit. It gets fucking exhausting. A/D puts an end to all that.

I do agree that modifier bloat gets to be a real problem in d20, but A/D isn't really granular enough for my tastes. Shadow of the Demon Lord's boon/bane system is my preferred in between. It has all of the simplicity of not having to track a dozen different numbers, has inbuilt difficulty gradient, and is effectively hardcapped at -6/+6 to any roll, which makes it less swingy than A/D.

Casters that can actually cast. Unthinkable!

Depending on the gameplay style, casters having a handful of at-will spells isn't a huge issue. The problem is that their infinite use options scale nearly as well as the primary damage classes' attacks and can be used to supplement the ludicrous level of utility that spellcasting already gets. Never mind that way too many of the later spell additions were just "damage effect with rider x."

Reintroduce the Turn concept. Some powers should be "once per Turn" instead of "once per Short Rest," like Action Surge. Have a well-defined section on managing the party's Turns.

NuD&D doesn't want to be a dungeon crawler. It wants to be a cinematic heroic fantasy tactical combat game wearing the skin of an older system for brand recognition. Many fixes that would keep the game from feeling so confused would require it to commit to an angle that either upsets dopamine fiending theater kids or further alienates it from a player base that already grumbles at how divorced it is from its namesake.

 

[Ghostse]

I do agree that modifier bloat gets to be a real problem in d20, but A/D isn't really granular enough for my tastes. Shadow of the Demon Lord's boon/bane system is my preferred in between. It has all of the simplicity of not having to track a dozen different numbers, has inbuilt difficulty gradient, and is effectively hardcapped at -6/+6 to any roll, which makes it less swingy than A/D.

What I love about A/D is how it FEELS to play. It engages players to a level beyond the actual EV+ value - if you still get dice raped on advantage, players don't gripe anywhere near as much. If you lose on disadvange, you can still see how you might have succeeded.

Again the only issue I have is that its A/D or nothing, and it maxes at A/D. There is no scalar, and too many things get crammed down the A/D funnel.

4e was on the right track by saying "Only the highest bonus per source applies", but then sort of ruined it by not always grouping or declaring bonuses, so while you couldn't stack bonuses the mix-max powergame was then to find as many bonuses sources.

Depending on the gameplay style, casters having a handful of at-will spells isn't a huge issue. The problem is that their infinite use options scale nearly as well as the primary damage classes' attacks and can be used to supplement the ludicrous level of utility that spellcasting already gets. Never mind that way too many of the later spell additions were just "damage effect with rider x."

The issue like you said is more that its a free damage scaling. Small little utility spells like mage hand, or being able to plink down some free elemental damage to affect enemies, or give allies advantage/enemies disadvantage is fine. But when you give casters as much damage as a martial's ranged weapon, that's lame.

I honestly felt like 3e's cantrips were way too limited, but 5e goes too far in the opposite direction.

 

[AnOminous]

Hell my favorite character from a Shadowrun game was a guy that eventually betrayed the entire party in the end(the other players didn't have an issue with this and some kind of expected it, the DM was basically counting on this to happen)

Reminds me of nearly every time I showed up as a PC at one of my friend's campaigns, where I was exactly this bastard. Everyone was like oh, this shit again.

They can, but when you've got a lvl 14 character rolling +50 on stealth checks, or casually making every lore check no matter the DC because they can get a +70, it gets well into the realm of stupidity.

This kind of shit (not in PF but in original AD&D) is why I got banned from using the gnome illusionist thief.

Basically, I distract the red dragon with some bullshit illusion, sneak in, steal the MacGuffin, cheat the party and take it for myself and run away, while invisible.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

My favorite cyberpunk type campaigns are ones where the PC's are cops, and believe it or not, they can still be free thinkers and buck the system from within it.

I've been wanting to do a CP campaign where the party is all Trauma Team. Being equal parts SWAT team and EMTs just screams interesting stories to me.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

CP campaign

Abbreviating Cyberpunk as CP is uh...

where the party is all Trauma Team. Being equal parts SWAT team and EMTs just screams interesting stories to me.

Wonder if anyone has done an all Trauma Team party (and talked about it at least), they're rarely fleshed out in official media from what I can tell so it opens lot of opportunities. Ah fuck now I want a Swat game set in a Cyberpunk setting.

 

[The Ugly One]

The problem is that their infinite use options scale nearly as well as the primary damage classes' attacks

No, they don't. They scale about half as well.

5th level Duelist Fighter: 2d8 + 14, 23 avg damage
5th level Fire Bolt wizard: 2d10, 11 avg damage

It's a huge difference. Then when you add in everything else that gooses martial characters, cantrips are a "nice to have," no substitute for a real damage-dealer.

 

[p1138]

Reminds me of nearly every time I showed up as a PC at one of my friend's campaigns, where I was exactly this bastard. Everyone was like oh, this shit again.

I guess. The rest of the party was perfectly fine with it though, and like I said some of them expected it. It was very much a "this is the end of this campaign, you'll end up going your separate ways or die" kind of situation, and as I recall one PC got killed, another got captured to get experimented on(possible future plot point if we ever play again), my character wound up being a corpo security asshole(basically bait set to be a bad guy if we ever play again), and 2 just flat out retired(one was too old for this shit, and the other wound up with a pile of cash). Because it's a bunch of mature players playing a TTRPG ins a dystopia, people were expecting bullshit and not just happy cloud best friend rainbows all the time, and it results in interesting storytelling.

Abbreviating Cyberpunk as CP is uh...

lol

Wonder if anyone has done an all Trauma Team party (and talked about it at least), they're rarely fleshed out in official media from what I can tell so it opens lot of opportunities. Ah fuck now I want a Swat game set in a Cyberpunk setting.

Trauma Team and DocWagon both have enough fleshed out(they use the same gear everyone else does, it's really not hard to figure out() that it could certainly work as a one shot or just a series of missions. However, I've never seen anyone run it as a campaign probably because it would get kind of boring story-wise. Like sure you're doing a job, and the circumstances of that job can vary but unless you're all into medical dramas or something it's going to get repetitive real fast. Haul ass to location, break in guns blazing if necessary, grab client, leave.

Both versions have varying levels of response based on the threat, or what they're willing to send based on what the client pays. So that can act as a progression system for the party getting bumped up to the top service tiers/response teams/specialists/etc. But even then you'd still need a group of people all willing to do specifically that on a regular basis.

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

I've been wanting to do a CP campaign where the party is all Trauma Team. Being equal parts SWAT team and EMTs just screams interesting stories to me.

It can be, but you have to be careful to not let it get too rote. You gotta make sure you got ways to shake up those otherwise routine calls. One plot I've kept in the closet for such a thing was a heavily armed chromed up serial killer that intentionally lures TT personnel to frag them. If he can't take them out while they're on a call, he resorts to stalking them off the clock too.

Steal it if you wish, you have my blessing

Ah fuck now I want a Swat game set in a Cyberpunk setting.

Protect and Serve sourcebook for CP2020 is pretty good. Again, favorite type of cyberpunk game. If you can find it and really want to lean into the Chinese cartoons, the Bubblegum Crisis RPG books easily allowed for people to be AD Police personnel.