GolGolarion

We've got a busy week here at Paizo. Come to twitch.tv/officialpaizo on Thursday, Aug 31st at 4 p.m. Pacific for a special livestream to kickstart our Pathfinder Playtest. Join Michael Sayre and James Case as they talk about the design concepts behind our two new classes!

I have no idea what they would even be at this point, I've kind of got every class I want. They did show off the gorgeous new cards in a very recent blogpost though, maybe a harrower of some kind? I'd be super suprised to see the original version of the Medium that uses harrow legends instead of mythic legends.

I've purposefully been holding off on making anything until 2.5e drops, but i'm pretty excited to put together an Anadi Wood Sorcerer+Elementalist that specializes in fabricating permanent objects during the adventuring day. Rope bridges, grappling hooks, nets, whatever you need, so long as it's got some rigid or rope-like components, they can put it together over the course of a short re-focus.

In games like Deus Ex and Dishonored, the player can leave combat ability on the table and go through the entirety of the game without fighting anyone. Stacking boxes to get to where they need, sneaking through complexes, and talking down the big-bad are all options that get you to credits. If you could coordinate with your team, i'm certain you could get a similar playstyle going in quite a satisfying way in PF2e. Realistically though, people come to this game to roll dice with their bardiches out, so you're more likely than not going to have a standard grab bag of murderhobos as your teammates.

With friends like these, how viable are your Adam Jensens, your Faith Mirrorsedges, or your Frisk Undertales? Can you really set up a character that doesn't use any combat ability and find success in a standard adventure path, relying on your team to take on your share of the combat encounter budgets for you? In what ways would you pull your weight to justify the character's "slot" in the party?

In games like Magic the Gathering, you're building your decks less around cool singular abilities, creatures and spells, and more about orchestrating a moment of critical mass where you can overwhelm and guarantee victory. Pathfinder 2e has some similarity to this kind of building, where the idea is less to make a situation where every time you X, Y happens, which triggers Z procs, and more to stack bonuses and penalties to artificially create critical successes for your team, then figuring out which ability or spell to best make use of that setup. For example, the ideal combat set-up against a boss fight on a balcony might be Heroism 9 on the fighter from the cleric, Synesthesia on the enemy from the bard, a Gust of Wind from the wizard to inflict prone, all culminating in a Brutish Shove off the ledge from the fighter.

However, the big appeal for TTRPGs for me is that not everything you can do needs to touch combat like in a traditional RPG video game. I'm particularly interested in strategies that help you traverse environments, interacting with people you wouldn't ordinarily be able to get a word in edgewise with, and bypass dangerous encounters entirely.

In this vein, I think Protector Tree and Shape Wood are a great couple of spells for any primalist to learn and prepare on the regular. Protector Tree creates a really nice damage mitigation tool in combat, but it also sprouts a permanent (unworked) medium sized tree! That's only kind of neat, but becomes a valuable resource when paired with the Shape Wood spell, which just so happens to require a bunch of unworked wood to be useful! Now, so long as you have both of these spells in equal measure, you can fabricate wooden items that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to bring with you on adventures for dirt cheap. Ladders, steps, platforms, wheels, axles - you've basically got a low-tech Garry's mod at your disposal! If you need a cart to move massive loot, a few casts and some basic assembly and a Form-Retention'd Wildshape will get that Mithril Door from the dungeon back to town.

Are there any spells, items, or abilities you've found useful when used together like this? I'd be eager to hear them!

Howdy everyone, you might be surprised to hear there's a 3rd edition of an unofficial TTRPG based on the elder scrolls, or you might not! It's a classless party-based d100 system where you can do all sorts of wacky stuff like make custom spells and enchant a fork to cast Absorb Health on hit.

I have a question about how you would judge a funky interaction though. The Atronach stone grants the Spell Absorption (5) trait, which does as follows:

"Whenever magic of any kind affects them, roll a d10. If the value is less than or equal to 5 the magic has no effect on them and instead they regain missing MP up to the cost of the magic."

Nice. It helps offset the Stunted Magicka trait, which prevents natural regeneration of your MP. However, it's a bit of a double edged sword. Suddenly whenever you need healing, it's a coin toss as to whether you recover HP or MP, which could be disastrous in certain circumstances. When the party Recalls out of the collapsing mine, you might be left behind!

On the other hand, the Mysticism school offers the Absorb Health and Absorb Magicka effects, which deal X damage to an enemies HP or MP, then restores half as much HP or the entirety of MP damage to the caster. Ordinarily, this is an inefficient conversion of MP to Damage/enemy MP, but with the Spell Absorption, it can completely recoup your spent MP 50% of the time... and it's trivially easy to make multi-hit weapon enhancement spell to grant you that coin toss on every swing of your axe, or a big pulse or cloak effect to proc a bunch of absorptions at once.

My question to you is, is that too much? Is that a proper "reward" for dealing with a 50% failure chance on critically important effects? At first blush, it seems cracked and definitely not intended, but I'm not convinced the upsides eclipse the downsides.

Minor spoilers for Stolen Fate.

I like that. More permanent items should be usable forever and hard to obsolete after you gain them. What's the point of questing for Excalibur if you have to retire it after a single adventure?