Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I haven’t actually run any APs, but I have Season of Ghosts and Wardens of Wildwood, which I’ve used to scavenge things from. Season of Ghosts, from what I’ve seen, is really quite good. Wildwood had less that I was interested in pilfering, but it seemed much better than people have said.
MyBrainHurts The AL East consists of the Blue Jays, who even on years where they have not been competitive in the division have been potentially good enough to win other divisions, the Yankees and Redsox, two very old teams from major US markets with shit tons of money, the Rays, who are possibly the most efficient team in all of professional sports when it comes to Wins/Dollar, and Baltimore, who are also sometimes a problem.
Most years, if you were to spread those teams out around the league, 4 out of 5 of them would make the playoffs. Meanwhile, there are divisions in baseball that if their leaders were in the AL East, they’d be in the basement.
It’s an absolutely crazy alignment.
When it comes to actually winning in the post season, differences between teams matters. That’s really where the good vs bad teams really stand out. During the course of the season, though? There are 162 game. Getting into the playoffs is very often just about being marginally better than whoever you’re playing all season long, not about being crazy dominant powerhouses.
Unless you’re the current Dodgers team, which has like a half-billion dollar payroll. They truly are juggernauts.
MyBrainHurts I mean, if you really want to see the trial by fire, they play the Dodgers in, like, a week or something like that.
It’s hard to say. Especially for the really bad teams, it doesn’t necessarily take that much to make them significantly better. A couple of years ago, the White Sox were on track to be the worst team of all time. The next year, they were a reasonably OK team, with the biggest differences in rosters being a couple of players coming back from injuries.
This year, the Rockies seem like they’re a much better team than last year. Last year, they were a clown show. This year, they at least seem to be a baseball team.
The Yankees are a real contender, and the Tampa Bay Rays are a perennial threat as well. Very different teams, both usually good measure. The Orioles are supposed to be much improved this year, and should be a solid team, too. The Athletics are pretty bad, and the Marlins are usually a reliable example of a go-nowhere team, too. Oh, and the Angels – they have a few really good players, but they consistently wildly underperform as a team.
It’s ok, the whole league sees them as “that team from Canada”, so that’s how I choose to see them, too. At least, until they return the Expos.
Sand dune on desert planet looks like sand dunes found in desert. More at 11.
flavonol@lemmy.world Many, I imagine.
I spend… too much time on the Pathfinder 2e subreddit, and it is so painfully clear from how quietly obsessed that space is with class build optimization, that the idea of fighting for anything but a decisive, 100% kill outcome (on either side) is unimaginable to most people there. I think the most recent thing I saw could be summed up as “what’s the point of Hexploration if the outcome is just moderate difficulty fights?”
Even the idea of non-combat encounters or worldbuilding encounters are becoming alien to modern TTRPG fans, it seems.
heythisisnttheymca@lemmy.world The PR person he fired has charisma.
iamthetot > would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?
Thank you. No GM is going to accept their players declaring a bad roll to be a good one, instead. Cheating players is one of the more common GM complaints. I’m not sure why GMs seem to think that’s a one-way street.
> When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.
Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.
I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.
mr_noxx@lemmy.ml Honestly, I agree with the others. I don’t know why we’re playing dice games if we don’t want to adhere to the dice. The dice create the uncertainty and variation that the play at the table responds to.
The more honest and transparent solution to players being at risk of dying is roleplay or narrative transition. Enemies don’t need to be doing coup de graces, and going down in combat can mean capture rather than death. But if it’s only fun for everyone if they’re winning, then why not play something else where losing is never an option?
themoken@startrek.website Some want to play XCOM without dice, and get really pissy when the dice say “no”.
iamthetot I’m in the middle of getting a forum going to keep track of my home PF2e game and organizey thoughts and ideas.
Maybe we should talk.
LurkingLuddite Yeah, it’s kind of wild that this discussion is happening on this post in particular. This is a galaxy that has multiple times more extreme gravity than other galaxies, and someone wants to use that finding as a reason to sell the idea that dark matter isn’t stuff?
If it were a modling issue, then wwe’d see this everywhere. This is the opposite of evidence against dark matter.
I admit, I’ve never touched Hero Lab, but I assumed you got the PDFs with the service. If you don’t… Weird.
Fanatical dropped into the basement, over on th’other site, to let everyone know that there’s a promo code for 10% off their bundle, which can be entered at checkout: REDFV10
thefuzzyfurrycomrade@pawb.social Fair. I’m just very used to people telling newbies that various aspects of the system are sacrosanct and non-negotiable.
thefuzzyfurrycomrade@pawb.social said in First-Time DM Advice?: > Magic items in this system are fundamental to progression, so unless you are using Automatic Bonus Progression you should be careful to give enough gold per level.
This is all about first-time GMing, so I don’t want to push back too hard on this or anything, but I do find that this element is wildly oversold and over bought in PF2e circles. The fundamental runes are, of course, absolutely built into the characters’ power budgets, but as an item component they are also a really interesting design/play space for GMs, but this is a space where the broader PF2e community often tries to put its foot down hard.
I’ve found delaying magical items and runes at times to be narratively and emotionally impactful when the players finally get their upgrade and can have an easier time tackling enemies. I’ve also found occasionally seeding dungeons with significantly over-levelled items to be satisfying for everyone, too. Both are often treated as verboten by the community at large, though, which seems to demand rigid structure to their games.
spitfire@pawb.social Yeah, the system just shuts down that level of min/maxing. There are no builds in the game that break the encounter math assumptions, and if someone thinks they’ve found one, they’ve either read something wrong, or discovered somethinf that will be in the next round of errata.
Rolls are always done vs a DC, which means there’s no worry of a low-level creature invalidating a high level creature by rolling high vs a low row (or vice versa). That kind of wild luck has been stripped out.
Bonuses of the same type don’t stack, so you can’t throw Guidance, Bless, and Inspire Courage on someome to get them a +3 bonus to a roll. They’re all status bonuses, and for each bonus type you tax the MAX, not the SUM, of all that have been applied, so the total bonus from those 3 spells is +1. This limits the easy, cheesy math-hack solutions.
DCs are level based, and frow quite large, which means players get very very good at tackling old challenges, but there are some challenges that are functionally impossible to overcome at any given level. Natural 20s have well defined behaviours in the game, so there’s no “automatic success” cultural norm that breaks this.
It’s important to note, the level that you use for the level-based DCs is the challenge’s level, not the party’s. The leveled DC table is used in designing creature and hazard stat blocks, and when creating a leveled challenge on the fly. Many new GMs to the system misunderstand the table and instead constantly scale every challenge in the game with the party.
spitfire@pawb.social Yes, CotKK was rewritten for PF2e, but and it runs fine, but it’s still a port, you know? It has some rough edges. From the players’ side of thing, I’m sure it would be just fine, but as a new GM… Let’s just say, it was the first adventure I bought, and as a new GM I waited to play it until I felt more comfortable with the system. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there are places where you can feel how it’s not representative of the system. If that makes sense.
If you can get your hands on a cheap used copy of Menace under Otari, even if you don’t want to run it, it’s worth reading through as a GM. It really is purpose built for introducing the mechanics of the game, and is quite short.
There’s no pressing need to restrict first party books, or even third party series like BattleZoo or Team+ sources, but the splat books do offer a lot of options which can cause analysis paralysis. Because the system doesn’t have the same optimization meta as other, similar products, the expansiveness isn’t really an issue, but players often get bogged down in the details. People who are used to playing the optimization meta, even if they want to stop, sometimes can’t help themselves. I include myself in that group. I’m hesitant to suggest restricting books, though, because I think some of the more interesting classes are in splats: Guardian and Commander in War of Immortals, Magus in Secrets of Magic, and Thaumaturge in Dark Archive.
A couple of more things everyone at the table should be aware of, though, now that I’m thinking about it:
theminions@lemmy.world The prone stuff also just seems unbelievable. Jabbing someone with your off-hand isn’t going to knock anyone over. It’s not a running body check against someone who isn’t bracing.
I see this all of the time in the PF2r subreddit. Everyone wants to know why it’s so hard to push enemies around or knock them over, as if they’re pro-wrestlers desperate to oversell for you for a paycheque, and not creatures who are opposing your attempts to do those things.