Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
[email protected] I interviewed someone for a jr data analyst roll once, and one of the questions I asked was to explain the Monty Hall problem.
They told me the odds were 50:50, so I rolled out the 100 door version.
They told me the odds were 50:50.
Management decided to hire him, anyway.
[email protected] The die doesn’t know it just rolled a 1. History doesn’t matter to it.
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.
No, archetypes are not subclasses. They’re a whole system of character modifications, most of which can be taken by any character as long as they meet the prerequisites. They usually modify some base element of your class (eg the Flexible Spellcaster archetype changes how casters select their spells, use their spell slots, and how many spells they get). There are a subset of archetypes (Class Archetypes) which are locked to specific classes, and which more deeply alter the class’s base abilities. The changes can be quite significant. This is where the presteige classes are rearing their heads.
No one complains more about a product than long-time fans of the product. They’re the ones who have had the time to feel betrayed by something, be it minor design choices, or things the owners have done, and who also feel a deep sense of ownership over the product.
Haters are just fans that feel alienated somehow, and can’t move past it.
The baker’s dozen is 13, because one of them is sacrificial.
[email protected] said in How fast is that in kilometers per hour?: So you’re saying as our own system ages the planets will get pulled in and eaten up.
Not in the same way, no. None of our planets are touching the Sun’s atmosphere in the same way this planet is, and none of them are orbiting at rates that are faster than the Sun’s rotation. If anything, tidal interactions would want to speed up the planet’s orbits, and push them into higher orbits.
But eventually the Sun will become a red giant star, which will change some of these relationships. We will see competing effects then: The Sun will begin shedding its outer layers, which will create a higher drag environment for the planets (that were not swallowed during the Sun’s expansion) which would tend towards inward migration, but this will also lower the Sun’s mass, which will lend itself toward an outward migration.
[email protected] said in How fast is that in kilometers per hour?: Would Jupiter being a gas giant get slowed down equally to the outer planets or would it eat some planets on its own.
All of the outer planets are gas giants.
Jupiter is not currently migrating inward, nor are any of the other planets. If inward migration happens after the Sun becomes a red giant, those other outer planets will not get anywhere close to it. As a red giant, the Sun will approximately fill Earth’s orbit. Jupiter’s orbit is 5x larger than this; Saturn’s is 10x larger, and by the time the Sun actually grows this large, all of the planets’ orbits will be even larger than they are today, thanks to gradual mass loss.
None of the outer planets are expected to fall into the Sun at any point in time.
Dwarf stars are technically any star that is in its core phase of life. They are dwarves in comparison to giant stars. The sun is a G-type dwarf star, for instance.
The star is a K-type dwarf, which means it is cooler and smaller than the sun (stars are labelled froom hottest/most massive coolest least hot/least massive: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M for historical reasons).
Planet formation is a complicated and still somewhat young field of study. Planets being close to their stars was a real shock 20 years ago when we stared finding them. The best models we have for this is planetary migration, where the planets form farther aewy from the star, but friction/drag forces from the nebula from which they formed causes them to slow down and fall into smaller orbits.
This planet continues to see its orbit degrade for even more complex reasons, related to both drag – it is interacting with the star’s atmosphere, which is causing it to slow – and tidal effects. When you’re close enough to a massive, rotating body that the differences in gravitational pull strength due to things like variations in density become significant, the rotating body will force you into an orbit that matches its rotation length. If you’re already orbiting faster than it is spinning, that means it will slow you down. But slowing down will cause your orbit to shrink, which shortens the time it takes you to complete an orbit, which will make the central body slow you down more, which will shrink your orbit, which…
Win if you can, lose if you must, but always TPK.
If you pick feats in a vacuum, based on how impactful you expect them to be in the mean average of all sessions across all tables, sure.
But you probably shouldn’t pick feats that way. They should either be an expression of your character concept, or a reaction to the campaign you’re currently playing.