Wow, has it really been August since I last posted here? Crazy. >.>

Anyway! We’re nearing the end of Tomb of Annihilation, so victory or defeat, we’ll soon be heading back to the characters from Storm King’s Thunder, all waiting patiently at 11th level for the story to roll back around to them. And, NGL, I’ve got cold feet. High level D&D and I have not had a smooth relationship over the years, in that kind of “our star signs don’t match” way that isn’t anybody’s fault but still gums things up.

Leaving out my philosophical/aesthetic problems wrapping my head around high level play, there’s also the fact that 5E’s rules just plain break. This was evidenced most dramatically at the end of Storm King’s Thunder when, after hearing about what a damp squib the fight against the campaign bigbad was, I buffed it like crazy and they still curbstomped her. This was an 11th level party going against a CR 23 monster, mind you, with big buffs on either side, yes, but at the end of the fight most of the support characters on either side were a wash.

It’s not so much the outcome of the fight that bugged me about it… I would have liked the baddie to last one more round, maybe? But she did get to do a few things. What bugged me was that this was a fight that, on paper, should have reduced the PCs to a thin yellow spray, and they knocked it out of the park. Good on them for knocking it out of the park, but that clearly means that I can’t trust the encounter building guidelines, period. This is a huge problem because, with so little high level content available, I’m gonna have to homebrew 85-90% of it, and I don’t have any tools to work with other than eyeballing everything and hoping for the best.

Just, ugh. :P I can do it, but the whole point of using The Popular Game™ is that I shouldn’t have to be building everything from scratch.

So earlier this week, I decided to give Pathfinder 2E a look. I keep hearing about how it has so much more robust math and so very many character options that we wouldn’t have to homebrew a new race for InkBlitz and SirFox every campaign, the rules would just cover it. When 5E came out I literally gave away almost all my Pathfinder 1E books because I was so burned out on the 3.x engine I knew I would never willingly run it again; when PF2E came out, I didn’t even give it a look, because I was quite comfy running my (at the time low-level) 5E game. By a weird quirk of synchronicity, I found a bunch of recent YouTube videos with titles like “Why Are So Many 5E DMs Switching to Pathfinder Lately?” which gave me a lot to chew on. By an even weirder quirk, Paizo just announced earlier this week that they are releasing a 5E conversion of one of their most popular PF2E adventure paths, which amused me.

So I dove into vids from prominent PF2E creators and I picked up a copy of the Pathfinder Beginner Box on Roll20 to give it a look. I built a PF2E adaptation of Shade-Of-the-Candle, and generally gave it as thorough a poke around as I could without starting a whole new trial campaign. These are the thoughts I had on the topic:

Running the Treadmill

5E and PF2E have fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings. Thanks to bounded accuracy, 5E is “static,” with the 10-30 DC range being pretty dependable across all levels. Even the advantage/disadvantage mechanic doesn’t change the range of numbers you can hit, just the probability that you’ll roll high. A completely cheesed-out high level character in 5E might make a check or attack roll with as much as +6 proficiency, +5 stat bonus, and a dizzying +3 gear/circumstance bonus, turning their average roll into a 25. But a skilled low-level character could also conceivably hit a 25 in something they’re good at! Since most creatures’ AC tops out around 20, the effect of this is that high level characters hit their target more often, but low level characters aren’t necessarily locked out of being effective at all.

PF2E, on the other hand, adds your level to every check with which you’re proficient—and to balance that, DCs and monster AC goes up by the same amount. As long as you only fight on-level stuff, this is a wash, but it means you will ROFLstomp anything just a few levels below you, or get ROFLstomped in return by anything just a few levels above you. This effect is magnified by the way PF2E handles critical successes and failures, and PF2E leans into that by having crits explode in effectiveness. High level creatures aren’t just hitting low level creatures more often, they’re pouring crit after crit into them. As a result, you get the MMO-style world that either quietly levels up around you based on your stats, or the challenges around you rapidly get trivialized as you level past them.

That’s something that used to bug me in 3.x/PF1, where it was less pronounced. In PF2E, you have to be all in on that design, or you won’t have a good time. Bring on the Level 15 stirges, baby!

Oh, and since it only effects things you’re proficient with, by the time you’re 5+ levels deep, the chances of succeeding a skill check you aren’t proficient with rapidly fades, leading characters to hyper-specialization in short order.

Razor’s-Edge Encounter Balance Cuts Both Ways

From all reports I could find, the encounter creation rules in PF2E have their rough spots but are mostly as accurate as described. And like D&D 4E, PF2E is balanced mostly around the encounter rather than the adventuring day. This makes story-based adventures (where there may only be one fight per day) work much better, as you don’t have a big imbalance between the casters/paladins/monks who can go nova, and the lowly “dependable martials” who can’t. On the other hand, it means that the only three encounter difficulties are “Trivial,” “Challenging,” and “OMG.” The best description I heard of it was “Every encounter in PF2E feels like a boss fight.”

As the DM, this can be super-freeing, because all you have to do is grab monsters that match the math and you can be confident you’ll get what you want out of the encounter. On the other hand, it can be super-limiting, because you can’t just toss whatever you feel like in there! You have to run the math for everything so you don’t accidentally put in the one owlbear too far that turns it from a good fight into a one-way trip to Boot Hill for your PCs. Where 5E is so loose as to be shapeless, PF2E is so tight that you run a regular risk of overtuning.

Swords and Spreadsheets

Pathfinder 2E is a game that is daunting to look at, period. Every character sheet or monster statblock is a sea of keywords that you have to either memorize or have quick reference for. Building your character requires choosing a Background, a Heritage, a Class, an Archetype, feats attached to all of those, and then any extra feats or proficiencies you still have left over at the end; then every time you level up, all of your proficient values change and you gain at least one new ability, whether that’s a class feature, a racial feat, a personal feat, etc. Running the game is an exercise in tracking “+2+1-4+2+2-2 = +1” calculations for everything you do, and because of the importance of critical success/failure, each one of those +1’s or -1’s is important. Now most of this calculation is just done up front (or when you level up), but if you have players with a short attention span—or you’re a DM who can’t hold more than three things in your head at once—there’s going to be a lot of “What was that modifier again? What does this condition do again? Wait, does {insert spell name here} apply?” going on, which is exactly the sort of thing that slows games and why 5E created the whole “advantage/disadvantage” system in the first place.

Basically, you’ve got to think about the mechanics a lot more often, and having a rule for EEEVERYTHING makes it a lot easier to “do it wrong.” The system gives you a solid framework to build custom creatures/items/character abilities on, but it’s like a giant erector set with a bunch of weird-looking little pieces. What do they all do? Why is this one at this weird angle? Why are there four different types of connectors??? I’m sure it works beautifully once you’ve got the hang of it, but from the outside it just makes my eyes swim.

My Fallacy Cost Sunk! (or, “Trading One Kind of System Pain For Another”)

Honestly, one reason I was considering PF2E was to bring back crunchy magic item rules for SirFox; 5E has worse-than-nothing systems on this topic and it’s caused us headaches in the past. But when I did a quick-and-dirty canvassing of opinions from group, he was the first one to argue against learning a new system so far into an established campaign. It surprised me, but other players said basically the same thing, and they’re not wrong. Jumping into Pathfinder at any level higher than 1 would probably be a disaster in terms of learning the system. But there’s also the fact that I’m just not convinced that it wouldn’t be just trading one set of problems for a different set.

I still have to come up with adventures that will work for these characters in this campaign. 5E is going to be mostly silent on this front, with me grabbing what third-party stuff I can find to use from the DM’s Guild, but mostly making it up as I go—with useless encounter building guidelines. Pathfinder has high-level content and great tools, but its adventures are as dense as the rule system they’re built for, and when I’ve run them in the past I usually end up throwing out large chunks and homebrewing the rest anyway. Even at higher levels, 5E is mostly-transparent at the table and fairly breezy in combat… the idea of going back to hour long fights does not appeal. O.o

So for the time being at least, I ended up deciding to stick with 5E. When we someday reach the end of the Storm King crew’s campaign, maybe I’ll look at running some PF2E just to see what it’s actually like… but I suspect by then we’ll either be at or near new editions for both. We’ll see.

-The Gneech

I’m not going to mince words: I am prone to Main Character Syndrome. I am not proud of this fact.

I am not the only person in our D&D group who suffers from this affliction, but I suspect I may be the one who struggles with it the most. Shade-Of-the-Candle could be a study in it: she is a natural leader, but also prone to going off and doing her own thing without telling the rest of the group what’s up, always thinks she knows the score (and is right more often than she’s wrong), and gets very prickly when things don’t go her way. As her player, I spend a lot of time biting my tongue to prevent the game from becoming “The Shade-Of-the-Candle Show, Guest-Starring The Other Player Characters.”

My drow bard Obsidian was even worse about this. In her case, I had built it in to her as a deliberate character flaw that she only really cared about herself and regarded the rest of the party as “her staff.” It was intended to be there to get some laughs at her expense, but I discovered to my mounting horror that some other members of the group readily bought into it and worse, the DM literally made her the most important person in the universe as a plot point, at which juncture I felt like both Obsidian and my own presence were doing the group more harm than good. :(

So for Plotline’s game, when I created Dusk, I deliberately crafted his personality to buoy up the other members of the party first. He is constantly talking up the other players’ abilities and interests, trying to find new devotees for the cleric, being fascinated by the artificer’s inventions, or dazzled by the other fighters’ combat prowess, etc. (He’s no slouch in the bragging-about-himself department either, mind you, but in his case it’s the buoyant “I love being awesome!” way of a himbo, and not the sneering “What have you done for me, lately?” way of Obsidian.)

I bring this up because over the past few days, I’ve been watching a series of “D&D Highlights” videos on YouTube (my favorite of which is posted at the top of this post). The videos are very silly and entertaining shenanigans, which is enough by itself, but what I have been most impressed by is the masterful way the players are supporting each others’ RP. Even the “grumpy dwarf” character is expressing that “grumpy dwarfness” in a way that can allow the other characters to shine, such as the character walking blindly into the pranks they pull on him even when the player knows exactly what it is going on. It’s terrific “yes, and” RP all around, even when it’s just pure goofiness.

Granted, these are highlight reels, so they’re showing off the best moments. But this is the kind of thing I want to see in my games, and it’s the kind of thing I want to bring to the table when I’m a player. A good D&D game is the story of the group, not of any one character. I think Dusk works towards this goal pretty well for the most part, and I think Shady can do that as well, I just need to be better about making it happen. In both cases, PEBCAK (“Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard”) applies, in that I the player have to remember to be focused on making the rest of the group shine instead of chasing after my own glory.

-The Gneech

So as a thought exercise, I levelled up both Shade-Of-the-Candle and Stars-At-Dusk to 20 to see how they compared both in a fight, and at their respective party roles. Here’s what I came up with:

SHADY: Bard (College of Swords) 6/Rogue (Swashbuckler) 14
AC 17, hp 167 (20d8+60), Spd 30, Initiative +11
Saves: Dex +11, Int +5, Wis +6
Multiattack (2/round); Crescent Moon: +12 to hit, 1d8+6 piercing +7d6 sneak attack; Cutlass (off-hand): +11 to hit, 1d6+5 slashing; Pistols: +11 to hit, 1d10+5 piercing
Acrobatics +17, Athletics +12, Deception +9, Intimidation +9, Investigation +11, Perception +12, Persuasion +15, Sleight of Hand +11, Stealth +17
Bardic Inspiration (d8, 3/short rest), Blade Flourish, Countercharm, Cunning Action, Distraction, Elegant Maneuver, Evasion, Fancy Footwork, Fighting Style (2-handed), Lucky (3 uses), Panache, Rakish Audacity, Reliable Talent, Uncanny Dodge
Spells: Charm Person, Cure Wounds, Enemies Abound, Enthrall, Healing Word, Hold Person, Mage Hand, Sleep, Thorn Whip, Thunderwave, Vicious Mockery

DUSK: Fighter (Champion) 15/Rogue (Swashbuckler*) 5
AC 20, hp 178 (5d8+15d10+60), Spd 30, Initiative +15
Saves: Dex +11, Int +6, Wis +8
Multiattack (3/round); Compelling Argument: +12 to hit (crit 18-20), 1d8+8 piercing +3d6 sneak attack; Longbow: +11 to hit, 1d8+5 piercing
Acrobatics +11, Athletics +12, Deception +8, Intimidation +8, Investigation +6, Perception +8, Sleight of Hand +8, Stealth +17
Action Surge (1/short rest), Alert, Cunning Action, Fancy Footwork, Indomitable, Second Wind, Uncanny Dodge
*My original concept for Dusk was to take assassin, but the way he’s been played leans more towards swashbuckler.

The first thing that immediately jumps out is that Dusk is a much deadlier fighter than Shady. Yes, if she can get the drop on Dusk and land a big sneak attack up front, that’ll surely hurt. But with that Alert feat, Dusk is almost guaranteed to be going first, and even if his individual attacks hurt less, he’s going to be doing more and occasionally hitting just as hard as Shady does with that increased crit range. Dusk is also more durable, thanks to his shield. To get in a third attack, Shady has to give up her cunning action, although with both of them being swashbucklers, there’s going to be a lot of hit-and-fade going on that makes cunning action superfluous. Also, Shady has to use Blade Flourish to bump her AC or damage output, and she only has 3 uses of that in any given fight.

On the other hand, Shady has a lot more flexibility and potentially fight-ending abilities, particularly Charm Person and Hold Person. Dusk’s high Wis save and Indomitable strengthen him against that, but Shady’s Lucky feat could then come along and say “Nope!” Heck, if Shady can get Dusk below 40 hp and drop a third level Sleep spell on him, that’s all she wrote.

In terms of the party, Shady is definitely a better leader and a lot more useful in social or exploration situations, while Dusk is more purely a striker. And the truth of the matter is neither one is likely to be interested in fighting the other one to the death. Dusk would probably be hitting on Shady the whole time, while Shady would be focused on whatever achieving goal Dusk stood in the way of and be looking for a way around him. But if they had to fight for some reason, I’d call their chances about even, maybe favoring Dusk just a bit but not much.

Which honestly? Seems about right. Shady is Jack Sparrow, while Dusk is Inigo Montoya.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that just beats the crap out of its protagonist.

Poor Cal Kestis can’t catch a break. One day he’s just a young Padawan, honing his force powers through tough love by a Jedi master, then suddenly some jerk says “Execute Order 66” and his world goes to crap. Fast forward five years and he’s hiding out on the planetary junk yard of Bracca, tearing apart Republic ships to sell the scrap metal back to the Empire to make Imperial ships, which is a dirty and dangerous job with a low life expectancy. But, unlike Jedi, it does have a life expectancy.

That is, until your only real friend gets tossed into a !sarlacc pit by an on-the-job accident and you have to use your only reliable force ability to slow his fall long enough to get him out of danger… catching the attention of the Imperial Inquisitors (former Jedi-turned-disciples-of-Darth-Vader) and having to flee for your life.

Cal, as you might expect, has some issues. But while PTSD makes him jumpy, fearful, and reluctant to stick his neck out (and understandably so), it never makes him mean or bitter, and I love the game for it. Cal is not badass. Not even a little. He’s sweet and humble in that Luke Skywalker way, doing his best to do the right thing in a universe where doing the right thing tends to get you horribly mangled or killed. He’s always checking in, looking for the best, and cheering up the companions he picks up along the way, even when almost every one of them screw up in some fashion that makes bad things so much worse. He gets mad about it—he’s not a saint—but he also works through it and looks for the positive (or, failing that, the least awful) outcome in any scenario.

Over the course of the game, Cal doesn’t exactly “get over” his past traumas, but he does undergo significant healing and growth, to the point where, at the end of the game, when confronted with a terror that he can’t possibly overcome and told “you would be wise to run,” he replies with a regretful, “Yeah… probably…” and stands up to the terror anyway, because somebody has to protect the people Cal has chosen to protect, and Cal is the only one there to do it.

And given the shit this game throws at him, that’s probably his most amazing superpower. Slowing time, Jedi psychometry, double-jumping and wall-running, wading through stormtroopers to the point where they’re literally calling for help, these are all useful abilities, but none of them define Cal the way just “being thoughtful and kind” do. In a world where so many game protagonists are grizzled, macho space marines, having a hero like Cal is a breath of fresh air, and makes not just for a good game, but for good Star Wars, which is something I have come to be grateful for whenever I can find it.

I fear for young Cal. Fallen Order 2 is on the way, and given that he needs to be out of the picture within the next ten years in order for Luke to take up the mantle of the last of the Jedi, I can totally see that going the way of Rogue One. But given Cal’s heroic (in the best way) nature… a Jyn Urso-style sacrifice for the greater good seems like his inevitable destination.

-The Gneech

I recently started a D&D space opera campaign which I’m quite pleased with. It’s in a homebrew setting (I hesitate to use the term “original” here) designed to be a giant mashup of all the spacey tropes, in the same way that standard D&D is a mashup of all the fantasy tropes. So we’ve got not-Jedi, we’ve got a “good guys” Federation and a “bad guys” Empire, battledroids, bug-eyed monsters, and so on. It’s a lot of fun!

So when it came time to figure out spaceships and the whole economy of trawling around in a little freighter, I naturally looked to Traveller, the grand-daddy of space RPGs and pretty much the unacknowledged model for things like Babylon 5 and Firefly. Its “tonnage + Credits” ship-building model has been imitated dozens of times by dozens of other games, and its interplanetary trade matrices have appeared in places as weird as Savage Worlds’s gothy-fantasy pirates 50 Fathoms campaign.

But you can’t just lift those systems out of Traveller and plug them in to D&D—the numbers are crazy and designed for a very specific gameplay loop. As SirPoley describes succinctly in his Four Table Legs of Traveller series, the game assumes that your party will be paying out huge amounts of money to pay for their ship every month, which will in turn drive them to engage in trade and/or exploration to scrounge up enough money to keep the bounty hunters off their tail. This trade/exploration is procedurally handled by the GM via random encounter tables and except for the random appearance of “Patron” encounters, could all be done faster via computer if you were so inclined.

And this is where we come to why I’ve never run Traveller. Just like I have little patience for grinding in a video game, I ain’t got time to build self-populating spreadsheets just to watch the numbers roll. Patrons, those rare high-paying jobs that actually force you to get out of your acceleration chair and go do stuff, are intended to be the spice of Traveller, a fun diversion that creates a break from the core gameplay loop. And I’m just… no. -.- For me, that should be the meat of the game, with the trade/cargo/passengers business being a fun little mini-game for the people who are interested in it.

So while I’m lifting some of the trade rules and tables from Traveller, the math is going to require some heavy tweaking to make it work for my purposes. The Enigma Sector characters already have a small ship that they used to escape from their Badguy Empire captors, and there are enough planets it could reach that they never have to upgrade if they don’t want to, so the “exorbitant debt payment” motivator is out. In its place, I’ve reduced the amount of money that cargo and passengers will make, and increased the operating expenses of the ship itself (in the form of fuel and spaceport fees) so that it’s still worth engaging in that system, but not to the point where taking time off from cargo hauling to go on adventures seems insane. (As SirPoley mentions, the pay scale for Patron encounters in Traveller is keyed off the size of your party’s cargo hold rather than having a diegetic in-universe value in order to guarantee this, which is taking handwavium just a little too far for me.)

I also want the players to be able to spend money on gear and such—partly because this is still D&D, and partly because at least one of my players just really loves that and I want them to be able to engage on that front. If they’re breathing fumes as far as money is concerned because they have to pay $50,000/month just to keep their ship running, they’re more likely to dump the ship than to go out exploring, which kinda negates the purpose.

Or, “You’re A hero, but you’re not THE hero.” This week InkBlitz and Gneech discuss group dynamics in Dungeons and Dragons.

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