Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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:
You want to make sure everyone has read Chapter 9 from Player Core, which goes over the basics of the game. 90% of it will be fairly old hat for people coming from 3.x and 5e, but it does contain the core system differences from those games.
Menace Under Otari, the adventure in the Beginner’s Box, is explicitly a tutorial dungeon designed to teach both game masters and players the mechanics of the system. Rusthenge is another purpose-built “first adventure”, though it’s not explicitly a tutorial, and has less system guidance for the GM. I’ve also heard that Dawn of Frogs is a good introductory adventure, that in some ways does a better job of introducing the system than Menace does (but I don’t have it/haven’t read it).AyeSpidey, on Reddit, also has an introductory adventure they wrote, that you can find on Pathfinder Infinite.
Crown of the Kobold King is a good early adventure, but it’s a port of a Pathfinder 1e adventure, so I don’t think it’s the best choice for everyone’s first time.
One thing that’s key for the game is making sure everyone knows what their characters do. As people who’ve played something other than 5e, I assume you’re all used to that, but I’ve seen a lot of people drop into the subreddit complaining that, as GM, it’s too much work for them to know how everyone’s characters work. The culture of “I don’t know how to play, I just let the guy hosting things tell me what to do” falls apart here.
PF2e is fairly heavily based in D&D 3.5, though, even if the core ‘engine’ is different. What’s markedly different, though, is how the game treats characters/creatures and the “character builder” game. The game itself includes a lot of guardrails that functionally prevent character-based hyper-optimizing. Character power bands are strongly level-based, and level is a direct, if mildly fuzzy, measure of character power. Many players grind against this at first, because they’re used to finding wacky interaction effects and loopholes that just make them functionally a higher level than their character sheet says. Instead, the game rewards cooperation, tactics, and outplaying the other side of the table.
A lot of people playing the system like it for for how it just surfaces a bunch of ‘paper buttons’ for them to press over and over again, and how it provides a rigid, predictable style of play. I’m happy for them that the game provides them tools to generate the experience they want, but I’ve also found that these players have a more generally dim view of what other kinds of experiences the system can enable. It’s a wildly flexible system that can power a huge range of table experiences, if you so choose. The key is understanding what is core to the game and it’s balance, and what is just “good ideas suggested by professional designers”.
The four core pillars of the game are the proficiency system (T/E/M/L), the degrees of success system, the action constructs, and the feat-based modular character design. Everything else is a default recommendation for adjudicating an outcome.
modernangel@sh.itjust.works They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.
They don’t shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they’re trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they’re not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.
Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They’re just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.
Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world’s story are there. There’s no “storyline” for me to bend around their gravity.
nocturne Yeah. They just say “5e” without specifying 2014 or 2024, but I think the lack of specifying and the use of legacy terms is implying they’re targeting the original release.
Bo was looking for a long term contract, and long term contracts usually have lower AAV. We know that the Phillies offered $200M for 7 years, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Jays offered similar. This is what Bo had told people he was looking for.
He then turned around and signed a 3 year high AAV deal. He just decided to pivot and play a totally different game than the one he’d told everyone, without telling the other teams he’d engaged with. I don’t think we can blame anyone for not making better offers when he seems to have made a very sudden change in his decision making process.
SilverGM Exactly! It seems, though, that far too few GMs feel like they have permission to go outside the posted guidelines with purpose.
A lot of the people developing early fantasy RPGs were probably deeply influenced by the American western as a film and TV genre. It was really, really hard to avoid in the 50s and 60s, and it functionally provided the blueprints for other adventure-based genres. The western provided the setting of the frontier, and frontier towns were all too often depicted as being deeply isolated and under siege by the “savage wilderness”.
Because indigenous people were usually framed more like wild animals than people whose living room you just plopped yourself down and started squatting in.
So many of the adventure modules seemed to be built around this idea of the frontier, or the hinterland, or of being on the edge of civilization that they didn’t need to have a theory of settlement patterns. They were explicitly showing us what things looked like where the civilization networks wore thin and broke down.
But they also just sort of acted as one of the blueprints for later modules, and later settings. And when your setting is entirely made up of frontier modules, you end up with a setting where there’s no civilization.
> sorcerers have a superhero origin
This is Oracle erasure.
> In the world they would be hated and feared as the person who started fires as a child or drowned a local cow.
Would they, though? Or would they end up in an upper class that controls world leaders from back rooms while looking like flashy celebrities in public? Because the takeaway from the real world is that racists hate on people they see as less powerful than them, and sorcerers are categorically not that.
heythisisnttheymca@lemmy.world The PR person he fired has charisma.