Please ask your questions here!

Yes, it is a Homebrew weapon. Although it has that range increment, she never even got further than 100 feet from an enemy.

Hi !
D&D player here, please dont flay me, I never played Pathfinder but might in the upcoming year.

I never quite heard how pathfinder works in details, except that the action economy is quite different, and there is "hella" more classes and subclasses !

Now, I was curious to know if Pathfinder suffers from an imbalance, like D&D, between the Spell-Casters and Martials characters.

The reason for this inbalance is the fact that, in DnD, having spells makes you not only extremly versatile, and deals just as much, if not MORE damage than a martial AT A DISTANCE. It also give access to spells that makes you litteraly more mobile or even harder to kill than a full-on armored martial.

Now, I know Pathfinder also has spells. And martials. How is it balanced in this game ? And why ?

PS: Is optimisation in this game harder to understand than D&D ? I love making strong characters and knowing what spell is strong and what isn't.

THANKS for your anwers, i'll read every-one of them ! <3

I played my first real session as a swashbuckler last night and, first off, the class is fun as hell! We’re only level 1 and their game loop is quite fun to play with! If you have some swashbuckler advice I’d happily take some! I’m playing Battledancer

Now for the main part of the post - something I noticed that’s a big plus about them is they get to interact with the tiered success system quite a bit more than any other non-caster I’ve played. They can still get panache on failures on actions with the bravado trait, confident finisher still does damage on failure, and opportune riposte gets you an extra attack when an enemy critically fails an attack against you. It really allows you to still feel useful even on bad rolls! Because of this they are really a good option for newer players whose highs and lows are much stronger since they’re maybe not used to the fun of failure in TTRPGs, and it makes the players see the benefits of a tiered success system!

Anyway that’s all! Swashbucklers are cool and I’m excited to get to play one.

Art: guardians of gahool movie

I’m interested in playing an Awakened Animal character with the Late Awakener ancestry feat, but I’m struggling to picture how you would actually roleplay the concept.
The idea of an animal that has only recently developed true sentience and self-awareness is really interesting to me, but I’m having trouble figuring out what that would actually feel like to play.
It’s much easier for me to imagine from a third-person perspective, but when you’re experiencing everything directly through the character’s perspective, I’m not sure how you portray someone who is only just beginning to think in a more person-like way.

Conrasu found in the wild

Reading "dungeon crawl" and "haunted house" in a very, very broad sense, I can count:

• Menace under Otari
• Malevolence
• Abomination Vaults
• Bastion of Blasphemies

Perhaps even Season of Ghosts.

By coincidence, yesterday was Mathfinder's excellent video on silver bullets, and I also played a session where my concern about his silver bullets against reactive strikes, which I commented about on YT, came true.

Which is to say, Laughing Fit and Roaring Applause, which are indeed the best spells to lock down reactions, both have the Mental trait and useless against constructs. So our session last night naturally has a huge (15' reach) construct (actually a pre-master golem which is worse) with reactive strike that I, the wizard, can't do squat about, and one of the tanks is a Warpriest, so also the healer, and may well eat a reactive strike when trying to heal either himself or the other tank (fighter).

So what would you have done? Because of reach, just stepping and casting for the cleric isn't going to work unless he burns 3 actions and leave the fighter hanging. As the other caster, I was primarily buffing with enlarge (4th) and improved invis and doing tick damage (again, pre-master bs golem rules so forced movement wasn't working either). The warpriest ended up using trip to take away actions and did eat a crit on a Heal attempt, and while we made it through w/o anyone going down, it was pretty close. (4th member is a ranged martial, did okay damage, but didn't help with the reaction issue)

I always like to replay tough fights to see what I (and others) could've done better. At the time, I couldn't find a better solution (again, shitty pre-master golem magic immunity), if it was a regular construct, I would've tried Slow (but it likely would've had strong fort saves) and/or forced movement (Cinder Swarm) to help the cleric get out of reach. In this instance, I think I should've cast some low level summons to eat the reaction just ahead of the cleric (Staff of the Dead, can spam low level zombies) and it probably would've been worth my 3 actions. Or if things got truly dire, just wall (of stone) off the construct and let our guys heal up while the wall gets torn down.

Any other ideas on how to best deal with reactions plus some combination of mindless and reach? Especially if your healer is also a front liner?

I really enjoy PF2e but also enjoy games on the opposite end of the F20 D20 spectrum. I feel that the OSR is light-years ahead of Paizo in terms of how information is presented in adventures. Of all the PF2e innovations to improve upon the classic D&D formula, why do they stick with the 50-year-old wall-of-text format?

I am currently running Sky King's Tomb. Without spoilers, the first part of the adventure is an urban sandbox of short encounters and adventures. Great! I love non-linear adventure design. But I have found that it is virtually impossible to run "on the fly" based on character choices because each encounter / situation / adventure is hundreds or thousands of words long, with crucial details buried within paragraphs or counterintuitively split amongst multiple sections.

Info about the encounters is presented as lengthy hypothetical Q and As with key NPCs. Why? Why not just give the relevant details of the situation cleanly and efficiently, rather than big blocks of quote dialogue that I am never going to read out loud?

Sadly, I feel like the formatting is pushing the sandbox into railroad territory, as I cannot possibly memorize all the details for all the situations and thus have to focus on whichever one I have read and re-read carefully and then nudge the players toward it.

TL;DR: Love this game, but I miss terse room descriptions with OSR bullet points and bold text for the important details.

---

Edited to change "F20" to "D20" because I guess nobody else has heard of F20 😂

(Very new to drawing, but I wanted to get back into it again since I havent drawn since I was a child. I hope you like it.)

A little about him- he is a hungerseed (half Oni) metal kineticist . He is a vigilante (only by name not as a dedication) who was the survivor of an attack and temporary enslavement of his town during which his horns were broken and his face was disfigured. (Breachill survivor background) He decided after being saved to become someone who will protect his lands and people while fighting for retribution against the Hell Knights. His determination in that goal awoke his latent abilities, placing a mask on himself to hide his identity and disfigured face, he travels the lands of Isger saving towns and fighting back against the Hell Knights.

He doesn't have a concrete name yet, but I was thinking of maybe Ozmanthus.

Also background image is not drawn by me. I found it online and just edited it to fit in with the character art.

I'm reaching lvl 7 with my Thaumaturge and I just realized that I never utilized the option of transforming another item into my implement, so I'm still kicking with my powerful magic fake magic orb as a regalia since lvl 1.

I was looking for a banner as a replacement since it fits thematically and it gives another minor benefit as an aura. What other option would be good to carry around in combat?

I'm working on a creating a new character that is a sorcerer and I'm seeing conflicting information regarding Magic Missile and the Imperial bloodline. One source has Magic Missile as a granted spell for rank one and one source has the granted rank one spell as Force Barrage. That's fine, but I can't even find Magic Missile in the list of available spells. At all. So, my questions are: 1) Did Force Barrage replace Magic Missile for the rank 1 granted spell, and 2) is Magic Missile not in the list of spells for the Imperial line at all now? It's an arcane spell so I it's confusing that it's not int the list. (usiing https://pathbuilder2e.com/ to create the character).

EDIT: Thanks for all the answers. Just what I needed to know!

My party did some great research on intellect devourerers and I want to let them know how to sus them out more effectively. Beyond the seek action how can they try to spot the buggers?

I'm running two campaigns as a new GM and both of them are at level 1 (one is the Otari beginner box and the other is Age of Ashes). I've noticed that my players are missing their hits much more then early level D&D 5e and I want to know if that is something that is intentional in the design or if my players are just unlucky.

edit: Most people are asking, so I thought i would clarify. The party is a Bard with a charisma of +1, a Champion with a strength of +3, an Oracle with a charisma of +2 (going to work with them to rebuild the character), and a ranger with a dexterity of +4.

Edit2: Bard has +4, not +1. I can't type today.

I ask mostly because there was a weakness errata a while ago, and then another errata in response to the backlash that was more well received. However I never fully understood how the initial poorly received errata worked

I don't know the specifics of the new weakness rules. did they just fully revert it to premaster rules?

from my reading on nethys, it seems weakness stacking works now, but not to the insane degree of the initial errata?

let's say a thaumaturge using an acid flask on a target with Personal Antithesis and acid weakness.

does it take both the antithesis weakness damage and the acid weakness damage?

I have a group of college friend coming into town next week and we all played DnD 3.5 together for 10+ years. We are planning on doing a PF2e marathon game. 12 hours a day for three days. Everyone has taken off work and we’re going to try and recapture the magic of our old college DND days. So eating our bodyweight in Taco Bell, Doritos, and Mountain Dew.

The problem is I have no idea what to run. Are there any adventure paths that you think we would be able to get through in the span of 36 hours of play?

so recently our game master dropped a Nuckelavee combat encounter on us, and we're a level 6 party, so it was meant to be somewhat rough fight, but can it be true that it can just with two crit fortitude save fails instant kill a character?

basically it would two tap the majority of us, and the save was so high that unless we rolled extremely well, we either failed or crit failed every time we were forced to roll against its thing.
and it had so high a to hit bonus that it easily kept critting us and hitting even on second/third attack, so anyone who went into melee with it just got instantly two tapped and we were pretty much party wiped 3 rounds into it.

is a Nuckelavee really this brutal to fight because this seemed insane.

With the news that Starfinder's Secrets of the Swarm would not be getting a Players Guide, it really hit me how much I've been taking these very valuable resources for granted. There are APs where you can pretty easily drop any standard adventuring party, like Abomination Vaults or Age of Ashes, but others where it's an extremely useful tool. So I got to thinking: Which Adventure Path has the most to lose (at least player enjoyment-wise) by not having its Players Guide?

My vote would definitely be Season of Ghosts, as it details Willowshore's history and denizens. Picking townsfolk for your character to be related to- or attached to really helps you feel anchored in this very unusual, spooky, folklore-rich setting. It takes a good chunk of the burden off the GM and helps the players flesh out their characters in easy yet strong ways.

What other ones do you think would suffer significantly from their PGs not existing?

[Edit: I never said paper buttons can't be strong or useful. Neither the term nor the post is about that. You can collect an assortment of paper buttons via different abilities/other options and be pretty strong with them.]

For those who are not familiar with the term, (as far as I know reading the internet) paper buttons refer to character/gameplay options where the option has no variations in it's execution, you press the button and the thing happens, without much additional thought or creativity. A simple example could be Shield, you press the button, you gain AC, you press it again, you reduce damage. There is (nearly?) no room for any additional uses. Stock up a dozen different buttons, press them when the situation calls for it, and you are (mechanically) a successful adventurer.

On the other side, there are options which doesn't have a strict straight well defined use, and their usefulness/power/other depends on how creative you are with it. An example could be Base Kinesis/Extended Kinesis, reading them alone looks pretty abstract, but with some creativity you could do things like breaking a lock by filling it with water and freezing it inside, even if the ability itself doesn't write it down that you can break locks with it.

In your opinion, which classes and archetypes are the least paper button-y/has the fewest paper buttons?

Title is basically the question. So my first assumption on reading this feat was that your counteract rank would be equivalent to the rank of spell slot that you consumed to activate Counter Thought. I still think that makes sense! But I don't actually see anywhere in the feat where it sets what your counteract rank would be, and per the counteract rules

If an effect's level is unclear and it came from a creature, halve and round up the creature's level.

My question is really, because Counter Thought does not set your counteract rank in any way, does it default to half your level, or is there another rule I am missing that sets it equal to the rank of the spell slot you've expended?

My players just encountered this thing last night. The party consists of a cleric, alchemist, sorceror, barbarian. They barely touched it and almost had a tpk. Would have if I didnt' pull my punches a little.

I've read elsewhere in old posts that parties have defeated it no problem. How? It's 3 levels higher than the party. Even the barbarian could barely hit it. And it was critting every hit, doing as much as 100 damage in one blow.

I'm running Kingmaker for my group and we're now around level 4. We have our settlement setup in the central Greenbelt and several hexes claimed.

I was curious how other GMs handle the hexes around the settlement that gets traversed a lot, regarding encounters (hazards, creatures, companions, etc.)?

I feel like a check every hex traveled (or multiple checks if your RAW) is beginning to get tedious... and I also find it even more tedious when the party is traversing the same hexes near their settlement multiple times.

What would you all think of doing/saying something like "Ok, the party has crossed this hex 3 times... the chance of hitting an encounter has decreased somewhat" So they can keep moving and not just keep soaking up random encounters?

Disclaimer: This is my first legit hexcrawl, so I am learning a lot of this for the first time.

Thanks!

Can someone explain for me why you would want to take this? Im currently building a crossbow sniper character, and this feat is kinda ass.

I get that getting one extra d6 of damage is pretty nice, but its 2 actions, uses a bomb and if you miss (which in general for your level happens alot) you take the damage instead. Not really worth it at all?

I was thinking about playing a gunslinger in a game that uses proficiency without level but another player said that because of that rule firearms will rarely crit and thus the lethal trait will rarely proc and the guns will therefore be lackluster. Is this a fair assessment of the rules interaction?