Busy in Paizo World

I'm playing in a PF2e campaign, GMing another, and curiously eyeing the Starfinder 2e playtest material. It's been an interesting week with all the new releases coming out of GenCon.

Player Core 2

I picked up the remastered Player Core 2 book on Thursday night and started going through it. I haven't read it cover-to-cover -- which is hard because it's largely a re-print -- but I've looked at the alchemist and swashbuckler changes.

This is what once was their 'Advanced Player Guide', and contains another set of classes, spells, feats, and items. It's just an expansion pack for the player handbook, essentially.

Alchemist is one I've been tracking pretty closely: one of the players in my campaign is an alchemist, and when we were doing character creation, I predicted they would get annoyed with how infused reagents work within a couple sessions.

Pre-remaster, the alchemist can do daily preparations of consumables like bombs and healing potions. They're limited to how many "infused reagents" they generate every day, which is based on their level. Once they use all those items ... they're kinda useless until the party rests. And the alchemist's usual way of fighting is throwing around alchemical bombs¹, so running out and reverting to "shoot crossbow like an incompetent fighter" is lame.

I'm happy to see they fixed this in the remaster! There's still some daily "freebie" crafts the alchemist can do to make items tailored to the situation, but they also have a near-infinite supply of bombs to throw in combat. It's mechanically more complex than that: they still have a fixed number of "reagents", but they regenerate out-of-combat every 10 minutes. And if you run out of the reagent in combat, you can spend an action to produce a basic bomb.

It seems like Pathbuilder has already updated and supports the remaster changes. The FoundryVTT PF2e system released an update with most of the data changes, but there's automation in the character sheet for alchemists and that is a work in progress. Surprisingly: AoN has not updated at all yet, which is really a bummer since that's much easier to read/share than the rulebook PDF.

I've gotta figure out what they changed for monk next, since another one of my players is a monk.

FoundryVTT

I wrote a bunch about getting started with Foundry last month. Since posting, I've run a session 0 combat test and a session 1 in there. The GM for the game I play in is a player in my campaign, and he liked it so much that he's migrating us to Foundry as soon as we finish the current chapter of Blood Lords.

We ran into a couple issues with Foundry/pf2e.

The first was that the system doesn't support the thaumaturge class very well. There's no way to designate which items are implements. And the class' core mechanic is exposing the weaknesses of monsters, which gives the player bonus damage based on their weaknesses (or a flat bonus, if they had no weaknesses to certain damage types) -- but there's no automation for this at all!

Fortunately, there's a module for that: PF2e Exploit Vulnerability adds implement tracking, the debuffs, and ties it all in to applying damage. The module isn't perfect -- Fling Magic for wand implements aren't as automated as they could be. This would ideally be an attack with a target, but it includes all the info/rolls for damage in the action's info in chat, so it works out well enough.

The second biggest issue is forgetting to target things when attacking. I ended up installing PF2e Workbench and setting it to prevent attack rolls when you don't have something targetted. That isn't ideal since you could attack a door or something else without a token -- but I figured we'll mostly be slugging it out in combat encounters.

If they forget a target, it makes my life as the GM slightly more difficult, since I gotta manually check the AC or whatever. That, on its own, isn't a big deal -- but I also have PF2e Modifiers Matter to highlight when their buffs/positioning is enabling them to hit. I think it's exciting to see if your buff helped somebody!

The next thing was a request to pop the character sheet out into its own window, so it's harder to lose track of it. I did some reading; this is theoretically possible, but it sounds like it's a bad idea. Once you pop it out, it changes how the character sheet can interact with the main tab. Depending on the system, this can range from "fine" to "completely breaks everything" -- and it sounded like PF2e, with all its automations, fell on the "completely breaks everything" side of the spectrum.

I think there's a hotkey to open the sheet, so I might remind everyone what it is and see if that helps. The player complaining about this was the alchemist, and it's harder for them to drag all their stuff to the hotbar, since they might be using different bombs every fight.

And then the last thing was one I noticed: they wanted to share loot or pass items around. Dragging them to other people copies items instead of trading it over. I think I need either Give Item for a popup "do you wanna accept this", or to explain how to use the party's treasure stash sheet to move stuff around. Jury's still out there.

Otari 1-Shot

For our second session, somebody is gunna be out of town. I said we'd continue with scheduled sessions if we're only missing one, but it felt kinda shitty to do that so early in the campaign. I think they'd miss a lot. So I put up a poll: cancel, Otari 1-shot, or Starfinder 2e playtest. The 1-shot won.

I'm thinking I'll run Menace Under Otari from the starter box, but provide them with some townsfolk PCs. That should give them some backstory, introduce a few characters they have not met yet², and maybe give me some story hooks for the future.

Starfinder 2e Playtest

Paizo's been slowly working on converting Starfinder to the PF2e rules. Starfinder came out in 2017 and I'd say the rules were even simpler than PF2e, to the point of it maybe being too simplified?

I remember feeling like a struggle against high-AC NPCs, and I don't recall as many tools to debuff 'em and let us hit as consistently. PF2e has plenty of tools for that.

Anyways, they launched a more-complete playtest rulebook at GenCon. It's literally PF2e with the classes/items changed out -- it straight up says you need the PF remastered rulebooks to run it.

I really love the idea of Scifi Pathfinder being fully compatible with Fantasy Pathfinder, because this means skittermanders can appear in inappropriate places.

I picked up their Foundry module for the first couple Starfinder 2e adventures, but I have not looked at them yet. It runs on the PF2e system with this Starfinder 2nd Edition Playtest for PF2e module as an additional dependency.

Spaceships

There's a huge thing missing from the playest rules: no spaceship combat.

When we played Starfinder around its release, we almost always hated ship combat. It worked pretty differently, with everyone manning a station and having a small number of actions they could perform. It required a lot of teamwork and puzzle-solving to make it work, in theory.

In practice, the encounters that the Paizo modules included weren't very good. I found that having lots of little targets made it really, really fun: we had to work together to figure out how to pop as many at once, and every station mattered every turn because we needed to position ourselves right, deal damage, and keep our defenses up.

But most of the encounters were a small number of ships, so a lot of turns for people would just be "lol okay guess I'll do nothing". And the players who did shoot guns would just kind of ... plink at the shields and not do much. There weren't very many good rounds where everybody felt satisfied.

I am curious to see what they end up releasing for spaceship combat. It's important, but it also needs to be consistently fun.