#pathfinder fucks us all

[guccigarantine]

people who’ve play lots of different ttrpgs what is your most frequent game mechanic mix up? mine is asking my players for a knowledge local/knowledge history roll whenever they need to make an intellect related roll 

[nemurenaivoron]

I been playing Sun Haven recently. Romancing local characters goes.. pretty well

[slitherpunk]

as someone who works on a lot of npc/enemy intelligence for her job i sure do hate how searching the keyword AI went from meaning stuff like pathfinding and behavior trees to just.. machine learning, chatgpt nonsense

[crows-of-buckets]

Threw his ass in the water today it's okay he deserved it

[pachinkosprites]

"moderate challenge rating"

[bite-the-bloody-hand]

Chaleb raises his weapon before his associates even know what's happening. One fatal blow spatters the ground with blood. Chaleb grimly looks at the body of the man he called a friend scant minutes before. His face shows no remorse. "That was the most elegant reprisal against the fools I've ever seen in my life,” Daeran says in a low voice so only you can hear him. "I am in awe. I sincerely hope to see you in action again, and more than once."

Folks, we love a seven inch height difference for unsettling boys that match each other's freak.

Not pictured: Woljif hamming it up in the background

[gilfrespecter]

Doodle page from the last few days ft Emerson in that one Orville Peck outfit bc it's funny and so so much of the other cowboy and a concept for a thing I need to do a shitton of research to write that I don't want to so it will float in my head till I eventually cave and do it

[steakbones]

looking at the pathfinder 2e accessibility items category these are so badass they have an immovable arm (immovable rod but its a prosthetic arm) wtf

[nejackdaw]

Thinking about the lich fight ("fight") from my first dnd campaign..... Ouagh

[aliosne]

Me, guy who has Feels Like Shit All The Time Disease and also Disproportionate Reactions To Normal Disappointments/Frustrations Disorder: why do I feel so frustrated and angry about this very mild and normal thing

[hexingart]

World's happiest barbarian Magical Girl who's gonna have SUCH a good time in her campaign

[lilyaceofdiamonds]

Brain can you please get the fuck over being yelled at — no, scolded — in a d&d game. I would like to think about anything else today than this endless loop of Intense Indescribable Emotions thanks.

[the-fandom-crossroads]

Folks talking about Game Devs dropping Unity or how it won't hurt small indie devs with under 200,000. Are missing the point.

Some of these Unity games can't change to another engine because they have years of code piled on top of each other at this point. aka POKEMON GO. They'd basically have to rebuild the game from scratch.

Not to mention Unity is mostly used by phone app games or Indie's that are lucky enough to get picked up by console. Indie games on Mobile easily pass 200,000 downloads. Temple Run 1 and 2 are in Unity, Crossy Road, Angry birds 1 and 2, and Hearthstone. All of these past 200,000 downloads years ago but aren't bringing in money now except hearthstone.

The Developers will do what happened to the first Angry birds app. They'll take it down, build it in a new engine for "HD", and add a shit ton of micro transactions. We are about to lose countless original versions of the OG pre lootbox mobile games.

We are also about to lose some of the biggest Indie games of the last decade. Among Us, Plague Inc., 7 Days to die, the original Slenderman game and it's sequel, I am Bread, Ori and the Blind Forest, Dream Daddy, Overcooked 1 & 2, Pathfinder online, Cup Head, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Oxygen Not Included, Bloons Tower Defense 6, Beat Saber, Subnautica, The Stanley Parable, Untitled Goose Game, Power Washing Simulator, Fall Guys, Inscryption, Phasmophobia

And the big one FUCKING HOLLOW KNIGHT. Silk song has already been pushed back out of this year specifically because it's being made by a team of like 3 people. It is so close to being finished and now they are being told they have to start over from scratch basically. Hollow Knight got over 200,000 downloads from being on playstation and was eventually put on Playstations subscription service. Every cent they made from hollow knight has gone back into making silk song. Which might now be delayed by multiple years and oh they are going to have to use some of that funds to pay unity now. Or find a way to get out of a contract with playstation. Because folks will keep downloading Hollow Knight for free and Unity will send the Hollow Knight team the bill.

oh and there's one more teeny tiny game made in Unity that you guys might not want to suddenly disappear. One with almost 3 years of monthly code updates, one with 139 million downloads to date, and 4.8 million monthly users.

Genshin. Guys Genshin Impact is made completely in Unity and that's not a game that can have it's code just copy and pasted to another engine.

[probablybadrpgideas]

THINGS I AM UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT BY GAME SYSTEM

D&D: Please put a disclaimer that you are not a universal system. Every time I see someone try to do a political mystery game in D&D, I take 3d10 psychic damage and have to make a death saving throw.

Pathfinder: Look. If i wanted to play a game about fighting Cthulhu there is an extremely famous game specifically designed around doing that. Literally no-one is ever going to say "Wow, I want to play a Cthulhu themed game! Time to stat up a musical halfling from a magical fantasy land!".

Chronicles Of Darkness: Just admit no-one uses any of your rules. You have Social Door Rules and Integrity Conditions and Corruption Levels and I bet at most 50% of COD players could tell me which of those I made up. Just admit people aren't dressing up as Alucard The Bringer Of Shadows because they want to sit down and do calculus.

World Of Darkness: You know that old guy who's still doing his job even though he is way too old to do it any more, but he's now an institution so you can't get rid of him? Like that. The 90s called and they want literally everything about this back.

Call Of Cthulhu: I appreciate the commitment to authenticity, but maybe stop hiring actual disgraced mental asylum directors from the 1920s to design your sanity system?

GURPS: Look. Look. Listen. We both know that you just want to write history textbooks. These are history textbooks with a few stat blocks begrudgingly put in. If you just give me a book on early Chinese history I will read it and go "ah, very interesting!". You don't need to put in a list of character choices. We're all nerds. We'll read them. Live your best life.

Powered By The Apocalypse: I actually can't think of anything wrong with PBTA. That's not a bit, this is literally the perfect system. Take notes everyone else.

Mutants and Masterminds/Heroes System: Your systems have probably the most customizable character creation in the world and you both just make reskins of the Justice League over and over again. Maybe we only need one "thinly veiled copyrighted characters" setting? You can fight over it once you decipher your combat mechanics.

FATE: Ok I won't lie, I have no idea how the fuck FATE works. I have read the rules repeatedly and played three games and I still have no idea what invoking an aspect means. I don't know why. I grasped the rules of fucking Nobilis but this one just psychologically eludes me. This is more a problem with me I guess, but I'm still annoyed.

Warhammer 40k: Have you considered spending less on avocado toast? Then you might be able to afford to charge less for things?

Exalted: Apart from the lore, the setting, the mechanics, the metaplot, the character creation and the dodgy narrative implications, I can't think of anything to improve here.

[psychicpinenut]

while i love the martian movie it seriously downplayed how utterly fucked mark watney is. need to get pathfinder? no problem he just hops in the car and gets it. what do you mean it took mark weeks to even get to it? he has a whole separate place to make his potatoes! he doesn't have to farm the entirety of his Hab and additional pop tents at all!! when the airlock explodes and separates from the Hab, he can just duct tape over the crack in his helmet and it's good as new. doesn't have to literally cut off the arm of his EVA suit to seal the crack and he's not rapidly losing air in the airlock. he makes a silly quip about NASA telling him to 'drill a bunch of holes into the top and hit it as hard as he can with a rock' but doesn't say that it takes him almost a week to do it because the drill he's using was made for taking soil samples. oh btw while he was working on this he fried the circuit in the pathfinder, cutting off all communications with earth. and he definitely didn't have to go around a sandstorm and didn't tip the mars rover over.

[public-trans-it-deactivated20240]

Fighters should have magic

I mean this shit 100% seriously BTW.

An impassioned rant about Fighters' place in modern campaigns.

There is certainly an argument to be made for sometimes not giving Fighters access to magic! In a low magic setting like Dark Sun (yes, I know the magic situation in that setting is more complicated than that), it makes perfect sense that Fighters wouldn't go anywhere near the stuff! In some of the more old school low fantasy focused DnD editions, or some OSR systems, it makes sense that magic would require years of practice for even the most basic of spells, and so Fighters wouldn't bother with it.

That is not, however, the bulk of modern campaigns. Be it DnD, or Pathfinder, or so many other fantasy heartbreakers out there nowadays, most campaigns are fantastical, filled with wonderous magic and queer tieflings and rogues who literally cloak themselves in shadows and jumping between planes to save the world and so much more!

In these campaigns, Fighters should know magic!

If your setting is even close to treating magic as commonplace, where having a level 1 wizard under the age of a billion fucking years old is considered within the realm of feasibility, than EVERYONE should have access to magic!

Any adventurer in such a setting who decided to start a life of wilderness exploration, and DIDN'T learn the spell Prestidigitation, is nothing short of monster bait. "Oh yes this spell that starts campfires and cleans my clothes and seasons my food and is THE MOST BASIC SPELL IN EXISTENCE certainly isn't worth my time!" - The words of someone about to get eaten by a coyote on their first night. Not even a fun magical creature, just a regular ass coyote because they are THAT unprepared. Even if it wasn't a cantrip and required 5 minutes of focus to cast, every adventurer should know this spell by heart.

But obviously, that isn't unique to just Fighters.

Fighters are focused on being masters of weaponry! They study the blade, learn it inside and out! They don't have time for magic... right?

No. They don't have time to learn SPELLS. That you could absolutely make an argument for. A fighter doesn't have to learn to shoot a fireball, because that's not how they fight. Not knowing magic that augments their fighting style, in a setting where magic is commonplace, is equivalent to that fighter going "Oh I'm too busy to learn to fight with weapons. I dont have time to learn to sharpen one properly." THAT IS ASININE. WHAT REASON DOES YOUR CHARACTER HAVE FOR IGNORING A SKILL DIRECTLY LINKED TO THEIR CHOSEN PROFESSION? Spells like True Strike are things a fighter would learn! But even if not spells, magical augmentation to their skill are something a Fighter would absolutely embrace! Anything that helps them further the effectiveness of their weapons should be fair game for their practice. Even if it worked like Paladins or Rangers where you typically just don't get the spells until higher levels.

And the games already reflect this! What do Fighters need to maintain damage pacing and ability as they grow stronger? That's right. Magic. In the form of Magic Weapons and Armor.

Magic armaments are considered commonplace in these settings, being handed out like candy. They are an expected part of character progression, and the games are balanced around the expectation that a fighter will be using them. So why, then, is the master of weapons and all they embody completely ignorant on the front of magical weapons?

Sure, a fighter might not be able to craft magic weapons. Not every fighter has to be a blacksmith. But much like how it should be expected that a fighter should be able to at least MAINTAIN their weapons, a fighter should absolutely be trained in the kinds of magic that are APPLIED to weapons. A fighter should be able to take a single glance at a weapon in a chest, and turn to the party and go "Hey this thing is cursed as fuck, don't touch it."

In worlds that are so fantastical and magical, it does not make sense to have a guy who's whole deal is knowing how to fight, and have him completely ignore A MASSIVE segment of fighting styles they will be going up against.

If your setting is magical, then your Fighters should be magical too, damnit!