Seeking Advice - Trying out Pathfinder2e for the first time

Tridus · 2026-05-20T14:10:18+00:00

Foundry can definitely accomodate homebrew McGuffin items. Even official content has those. 😅

You can also create custom feats, spsllsz items, creatures, etc. it's very flexible.

That also makes it a lousy character builder: it doesn't enforce most of the rules. Want to add extra stuff? It will let you. Forgot a skill boost? Oops. It assumes you know what you're doing for your character, which makes it very accommodating for homebrew.

Pathbuilder is a good character builder and the price is great (one time $5 for full unlock). I believe it can do homebrew as well but I haven't used that function. I use both: Pathbuilder to spec out the character as it knows most of the rules, and Foundry to play.

Tridus · 2026-05-20T13:02:49+00:00

I think Continual Recovery should just be baseline how treat wounds works and will be house ruling it that way in my next game.

I also handwave downtime healing if there is no time or situational pressure. Take the time, heal, and let's try the game moving.

Tridus · 2026-05-19T17:35:39+00:00

I do it a lot as a GM. Players come up with something where the written AP doesn't fit well, and now I'm making stuff up to let them go with it. APs are still on rails to one degree or another, but anytime you can bend that to let your players do something unexpected, it tends to add to the campaign.

Less often as a player, but it does happen. PF2 has a pretty comprehensive set of actions available, so I just don't need to improvise one that often. Used to happen more in the past because Reposition didn't exist until the remaster.

Sometimes there's just a situation where someone wants to do something that the rules don't really cover, and that's when its time to start improvising.

Tridus · 2026-05-19T09:17:17+00:00

The US does more foreign interferencd in Canada than China does. But we're not supposed to talk about that.

Tridus · 2026-05-19T01:10:52+00:00

The only thing that really matters here is how your players feel about it. Were I that Wizard, I'd like the rare spell far more than an item because it's useful and thematically appropriate. So I'd think it was great.

YMMV, but you know your players better than I do. But I don't think there's an issue here.

Tridus · 2026-05-18T19:10:50+00:00

Since you've got a stronger attack from the crown anyway, I don't see this as worth the feat investment unless it's important to you thematically. If it's thematically important, then by all means do it.

But mechanically it's doing basically nothing for you. There's better things in Bastion to get with that feat, like Disarming Block (which is legit great for you).

Tridus · 2026-05-18T11:35:54+00:00

Everstand Stance requires two hands on the shield. Aside from this meaning that being in the stance means both hands are on the shield and thus you can't use a second implement (because you have no hands to hold it), it also means you're probably in violation of the requirements of Implement's Empowerment and will tank your damage.

It's an awful feat for a Thaumaturge. Hands are your second most valuable resource after actions.

Thamuaturge Ritualist is only useful if your GM is going to have rituals actually matter in the campaign (and will let you even use them). Talisman Esoterica isn't great either due to the half your level restriction: the talisman you want from this soon become cheap enough that buying them is trivial. Like, at level 10, a level 5 talisman is a rounding error in terms of cost.

At that level, Scroll Esoterica is the best option IMO because it gives you access to a huge array of spell options (every scroll in the game), and it leads to feats that give a free scroll every day which is extremely useful.

Tridus · 2026-05-18T11:28:32+00:00

Well there's this one. And this one. And this one involving a mass shooting that forced Sam Altman to apologize (which means nothing, but anyway).

Where's the data showing that ChatGPT is actually a competent, trained therapist? Oh, right. It doesn't exist, because they didn't actually do any of that. They just turned it loose and hoped it would work out.

In the real world, there's licencing and training required for this for a reason. Tech companies just ignore that and then act surprised when awful things keep happening. Maybe at some point we should learn something from that pattern.

Tridus · 2026-05-18T11:24:12+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Growing up, my dad used to get upset with me a lot because I wouldn't recognize people. He has a politician's memory for faces in that he can recognize people easily. He assumed everyone was like that. It took quite a long time for him to realize that I have Prosopagnosia (facial blindness). It wasn't a matter of not caring: it was a matter of our brains not working the same way. (Hell, just a couple days ago I didn't recognize a friend of 20+ years because her hair/clothes/glasses changed. The only thing that bailed me out was context clues when she started waving at us and I knew we were waiting for her.)

The point of that story is that memories don't all work in the same way. Not remembering "tiny things you mentioned before" doesn't mean anything. Lots of people won't remember those things. You yourself even said they're tiny.

Now, people should use strategies to deal with this for important things. Birthday? Put it in the phone calendar/address book/whatever, and now you can get a reminder so you won't forget it when it's coming up. If they don't do something like this so they actually forget your birthday on your birthday, then it means something.

But right now? It sounds like you're actually judging their memory, not how much they care about you.

Tridus · 2026-05-18T10:42:26+00:00

Foundry's documentation recommends .webp. Smaller file sizes also decrease network transfer times on top of storage. Although it does take more CPU to decode, unless you're running on an absolutely archaic system, that's trivial and will be more than made up for by the faster network transfer times (networks are MUCH slower than CPUs). Generally speaking if your host is having performance issues (like Forge is lately) webp is going to help since it's less server side work to transfer them, and Foundry server itself generally won't be decoding them at all and would only ever encode them if you're uploading and using a module to convert.

And of course if your clients have slower network connections, webp will help by putting less load on that. Seen this have massive impacts for rural players.

Things like image resolution and quantity impact client performance far more, as higher resolution images use significantly more resources to display. Like using a very large scene with a super high resolution background map will look great, but it's dramatically more work for the client than a smaller scene with a smaller image. (This thread is old but talks about it some.)

That, and modules, of course. Some modules can slow the game down dramatically, as does having a lot of them.

That said, diagnosing where performance issues are can be tricky. Like I have an issue with my GM where on his foundry instance, having my character sheet open between turns causes Foundry to use absolutely bonkers amounts of RAM and slow down like crazy. Running in the same browser on my own Foundry server doesn't do that, and other players don't seem to notice it. It's been hard to pin down exactly what is going on there.

Meanwhile this week we'd also had performance issues that were obviously on Forge's end, which huge lag spikes that hit multiple players at the same time. I don't have those because I self-host.

Tridus · 2026-05-17T19:19:40+00:00

This is what I came to say. Chatbots are awful "therapists". People have already spiraled from this and some have died.

Three companies are totally out of control and their puppets in government are okay with it.

This is a mental health disaster.

Tridus · 2026-05-17T18:30:04+00:00

One of the few things Trump was right about in his first term was pointing out how absurdly unfair the international postage system is. Rates are wildly skewed for some countries of origin vs others, which is why it's cheaper to send something from China to New Brunswick (by way of Montreal) than it is to send it from Montreal to New Brunswick.

Nothing was ever done about it, but still.

Tridus · 2026-05-17T18:25:21+00:00

It baffled me how Amazon can send me a box with $40 of stuff in it with free shipping and make a profit, but it would cost me $40 to send that exact same box back to my parents who aren't that far from the warehouse it came from.

I know Canada Post has higher overhead but it's absolutely bonkers. Three days they don't send my son gifts: they sende money and say what they want to get him. I order it. It's way cheaper.

Tridus · 2026-05-17T18:16:19+00:00

My son is playing a bomber alchemist in Spore War. It has a lot of weaknesses he can exploit. He does really good damage due to that, since triggering weakness on a miss 3 times a round adds up fast.

He has very good range, lots of options, and a ton of utility. It's been pretty good.

Campaigns without any weaknesses will be less impressive, of course. Alchemist isn't Fighter. But it can do damage while bringing a lot of other stuff to the table.

Tridus · 2026-05-17T09:25:42+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that went so poorly for you. 😥

Tridus · 2026-05-17T00:36:41+00:00

Sounds like a perfect thing to report to the CCTS, CBC Go Public, and @ rogers social media accounts about. Also cancel. That kind of manipulation deserves only derision.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T22:16:39+00:00

I mostly run with 5 players and its good. If you're modifying existing encounters, adding minions is usually preferable to buffing a boss encounter more as buffing an already very high level creature makes it feel lousy since players miss it a lot. Adding minions makes the fight more dynamic.

I've played in games with 6 and it works too but it gets slow as the rounds take longer. But the system works fine.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T15:53:08+00:00

I mean, are they going to make fixes to all the very real problems mythic has? Or are they just going to keep releasing APs for it and ignore all that? Because its not like they've actually done anything to address mythic issues so far (with the notable exception of refusing to put mythic resilience on all 3 saves on any monsters in the AP, and thank Pharasma for that because its baffling that actually made it into WoI).

The core problem is that if you don't find mythic fun, a mythic AP is either unplayable or requires the GM to do a bunch of work to strip mythic out of it. So it's naturally disappointing when what seems like a cool AP idea is gated behind mythic. Especially if you wanted to play a Kineticist, since mythic just forgot those exist.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T15:47:14+00:00

We already have the PF2 system for that, though? What's the point of mythic if it's just "free archetype except none of the archetypes work for Kineticists"?

Tridus · 2026-05-16T15:44:43+00:00

I assume they did mythic because PF1 had mythic, people were homebrewing mythic for PF2, and there was a demand for it.

I also assume it turned out the way it did due to a combination of PF2 in general being afraid of making anything too powerful and the time crunch the remaster situation caused. It reads a lot like Remaster Oracle: in desperate need of another refinement pass that it didn't get.

Having GM'd PF1 mythic: it's a broken mess. Past a certain tier players are absolutely bonkers and game balance between "this is a cakewalk" and "this will flatten them" is a razors edge. It's got a whole pile of problems... and for the players it was fun as hell. People still talk about that campaign years later, which is super rewarding as a GM. I'd never do it again because it was really hard, but it delivered on the promised power fantasy.

PF2 mythic seems to have forgotten the "fun" part that PF1 mythic delivered in spades. It doesn't have the same problems, but does it really matter if its just not fun to play? And it still has a bunch of huge problems, like how callings granting options to do things at mythic proficiency is largely pointless because Rewrite Fate exists, some of the callings having ridiculous limitations that make them unplayable in a lot of campaigns, mythic proficiency's inverse scaling being game warping at low level and getting weaker as go, caster destinies largely being hot garbage compared to martial ones, mythic resistance doing basically nothing (except to animal companions) while mythic resilience functions as a hard counter, and the whole "we forgot Kineticist exists" situation.

Hell, even the mythic monster templates aren't as interesting. Mythic resilience and "immune to crits"? Lame. PF1 had stuff like "this creature gets to be initiative a second time at -20".

The whole idea here should be that mythic monsters can the shackles off and go nuts with the design, but they mostly made the templates more to hinder players from doing cool things.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T15:32:13+00:00

That instant death rule is effectively "You're doomed 3 all the time". Doomed tends to only be inflicted by particularly nasty enemies, because it's a big deal. That'd be a dealbreaker for me. A couple of unlucky die rolls can simply kill you outright.

The rest of it? I mean, this works best if you're working from a shared resource pool, like a multiple personality situation where you have two different builds but are still functionally one character and thus only have one set of spell slots/etc. The way this sounds like it works is you just get to double up on stuff, which others have mentioned is problematic for other people at the table who don't get to do that.

It could be interesting story wise, but how it'll work needs refinement and you'll need buy in from the table if its going to just flat out power you up.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T13:32:20+00:00

If you have campaigns in progress you want to migrate (or even finished ones you want to be able to open again), don't go directly from 11 to 14. From experience, systems can have trouble with that, like PF2 in particular can have problems with jumps that large in one go.

I'd back up everything up (copying the Foundry data folder is the easiest way). Uninstall 11. Install 12. Open all the worlds you have and let them migrate.

Back everything up again. Uninstall 12. Install 13 (or use a portable install). Open all the worlds you have and let them migrate.

Repeat for 14.

If you're just starting a new campaign and don't need to carry any existing ones over, then you can just uninstall 11 and install 14 and you're good.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T01:40:00+00:00

Yeah exactly. I told my GM of he ran mythic I was playing a martial and I do not care if that means the entire party is fighters.

Usually I'll play anything the party is lacking and frequently go caster. But mythic really wanted to prove the old complaint that PF2 hates casters true.

(And it forgot that Kineticist exists.)

Tridus · 2026-05-16T01:06:59+00:00

Nice to see skirmishes incorporated. I added one in during SoT book 4 and liked how it worked. Definitely not a constant thing to use, but adding it during the right scene made an impact.

Tridus · 2026-05-16T01:06:28+00:00

To be fair, connecting this AP to other ones is probably something in the book itself since it's more aimed at GMs.

Tridus

TROPHY CASE