Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  • 16 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2025

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  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.




  • > 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?







  • 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.