Kichae

thegreatdarkness@ttrpg.network Sure. You should be able to use LotR to explain the rules of any fantasy RPG system, really.

LotR is running Pathfinder 2e under the hood, by the sounds of it, using Proficiency Without Level.

Ok, that’s brilliant and awesome. Brisome.

empathicvagrant@lemmy.world Backstory is probably the wrong concept for a low-level character. They, instead, have a background. Backstories are prequel fodder, while backgrounds are used to figure out character motivation, and how a character reacts to future events.

Generally speaking, you don’t want to fill in blanks you don’t need filled i, because it’s creatively limiting your future self. If the events that got you to Session 1 are too interesting, you’ve probably written too much.

ensignwashout@startrek.website I don’t know, zero-to-hero is one of the best story tropes out there. Totally nullifying it seems kind of wild to me. But you have to know who you’re playing, and if you’re playing a highly skilled veteran with a rich history of great deeds, you need to understand that that is not a Level 1 character.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that people don’t want to play low level characters. Level 1 characters are neophyte adventurers. Their backstory shouldn’t include significant a mounts of adventure, combat, or heroics, because it introduces a significant amount of ludo-narrative dissonance into the campaign.

Unless there’s a reason they’ve been de-leveled.

This is functionally what Fellmarrow is doing in Narrative Declaration’s Kingmaker 2e actual play.

So many people hate secret rolls. So many people feel like they remove agency from them.

But that’s what the dice do. They’re agency-revoking machines.

One of my favourite parts about Pathfinder 2e is that items – magic or otherwise – are leveled. I can hand out Level 6 weapons to Level 2 characters, and they will feel absolutely legendary.

Until about Level 5, where they start to feel really good.

Until Level 8, where they just feel OK.

This means, yes, I can take the effort to rebalance fights to account for the party’s toys, or I can just let them feel like fucking bosses for a few levels, and the challenges they take on catch up to them.

Ok, that’s it, for my next character I’m going to play as a Lepton Ranger.

No, it’s also better if you want an internally consistent system built on top of sensible principles. Or a system with reliable baseline for power scaling. Or if you want to invite an optimizer or a newbie to your table.

It’s not a “tactical combat RPG”. That’s a wild misconception propagated by both tactical combat fans and people who have looked over the hedge and been scared away by somethings being different. It is, instead, a well crafted systemic RPG, designed with reliability at its centre.

Reliability enables tactical combat, which is why TC fans flocked to the system, but it enables a hell of a lot more, too.

It’s also better if you want a steady stream of new content without paying Hasbro or relying on randos.

See, I don’t think that 20 does make up for that 1, any more than your 20 on an attack roll lets me roll damage on my 1.

The party isn’t some cohesive, singular unit that catches or avoids attention based on some average of the total behaviour. It’s instead a cloud of actors that are only as strong as its weakest member.

Like, if they were 4 kids sneaking cookies from the cookie jar, and the youngest knocked the jar off the counter, it really doesn’t matter how quiet the other 3 were, the shattering of the jar is going to get them all caught.

So many family recipes are documented this way, though, so it’s a significant problem when these are handed down.

“I just skip grandma’s chili because she didn’t record it using volume or weight for everything” isn’t a thing people say or do.

Pathfinder fixes th… Wait, which forum was this again?

No, you’re not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It’s just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.

Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It’s a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don’t like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.

So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They’ll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.

It’s only a TTRPG if you can win it in character creation. Everything else is just sparkling video game.

Aye. And there are things the player can do that lets them take 2 attacks for one action, but you get a normal Multiple-Attack-Penalty progression between each attack, and there are things that let them take 2 attacks for 2 actions – as would be normal – but which do not progress the MAP until after the second attack is done. And there are a lot of each. Or rather, there’s functionally 1 of each, but it’s often named different things for different classes.

The single-action variety can be seen, in-world, as being very fast, taking multiple individual attacks in very quick succession, like with Flurry of Blows. The two-action variety can be seen as hitting someone with two different weapons at the same time, as with Double Slice.

It does bother me that both let/make you pool your damage for dealing with resistances/weaknesses. Given the choice, I’d probably have the two-action varieties pool damage, and the single-action ones count as multiple instances. But nobody asked me.

There’s a Pathbuilder 1e, but I think it might only be for Android. I haven’t seen a web-based version.

Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they’re on the ground (prone), when they can’t see where they’re being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).

Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.

It’s not available yet on iOS (though an iOS port is in development). You can find it on the web at pathbuilder2e.com. Mobile and web apps don’t sync, though. The paid versions allow you to save characters to Google Drive, which you can use to sync them.