It's only a TTRPG if you can win it in character creation. Everything else is just sparkling video game.

And then you take the Test of the Starstone. As a joke, of course.

Accidental ascensions are never the punchline to a joke.

I'm looking to DM kingmaker on pf2e! Let me know if you're interested.

Did D&D polymorph into a faucet?

PF2e tries to have it both ways: - If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit. - If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss. - Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit). - Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail). In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D. But when you're out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe *not,* and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it's time to run. Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger *is* a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got *really* bad. Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it's a pretty elegant system.

D&D is *one* system.

> That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad. That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I've heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much "everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again". I like how Fate lets anyone "create an advantage", so your party face that can't throw a punch can use their "Bravado" skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that

It's more formalized than Fate, but absolutely. There are feat trees, even entire *classes* that make that their whole deal. Buffs, special moves and tactics, AOE debuffs, heal spells that target a different number or area of creatures depending on how many actions you use to cast them, the whole thing. Paizo just released "Battlecry" last month, and the new classes in the book would be terrible for a solo game: the Guardian (literally a big sack of hit points with high AC, but with special powers to force enemies to attack them and only them) and the Commander (a class that the RPGBot guys called "Dual-Wield your friends!" because they have, among many other support actions, an ability that lets them give one teammate the ability to shove an enemy toward another teammate, who can then hit it. On the *commander's* turn.) But *every character* can use the Aid action, which is very powerful, and often worth sacrificing an attack for; especially if your multiple attack penalty is at -10.

Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn't have giant blank spots that you're expected to fill in for a few levels. They're switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn't shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.

Sure but Pathfinder 2E is explicitly about teamwork and positioning. One archer will not be able to hit the death knight unless it's very lucky (which IMHO makes sense), but an archer supported by some melee fighters flanking the knight and giving them some off-guard malus has way better odds. "Every +1 matters" is true for both the party and the NPCs I understand heroic fantasy not being your cup of tea, that's the beauty of having lots of RPGs to choose from. But beware of thinking that bounded accuracy makes things more gritty. In my experience it just makes things more heroic for the party (which can now take down a dragon at level 2) and just breaks down after the first dozen levels

Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don't lay down much damage, but _they can **move**_, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip). I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I'm just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.

I've always been allergic to spell casters (the strategy behind the best use of spell slots just never clicked for me - which is extra painful because it seems like if should be simple, but I consistently manage to botch it), going back to when i picked this all up in the 3.0e days. I think that's caused me to not really engage with the spell casting side of spell casters in PF2e. I remember in 3.5, we banned Mystics because spontaneous divine spell casting was broken, so maybe I just need to run one to see if work.

Sounds like a good resource, but I guess what I meant was a setting to run a game in (e.g. a campaign set in the Inner Sea or Sword Coast) with enemies and grabbags of challenges with balanced NPCs for side interactions and such.

I've come to the conclusion that 3.5e was the peak of TTRPG and frankly I've just decided I'm going to go back to that. It's not like there isn't plenty of 3.5e materials to use.

Pathfinder is D&Ds brother that studied business and economy instead of theater

You forgot counteracting. So effin elegant!

That's awesome. I haven't gotten my head around a swashbuckler myself, but the ones I've seen play definitely feel like they're "of a kind" with gunslingers. It's worth noting, too, that the gunslinger "way" that you choose will define a lot of how the class plays. My pistolero's quick, seemingly careless gunplay will feel very different from someone who builds a sniper and is much more methodical and sneaky.

They have several setting/adventure books, a lot of IPs choose to my heart: Star Trek, Discworld, Girl Genius. You can get their *Infinite Worlds* book which is kinda the default setting. It's a multiverse thing so technically your homebrew is canon, but they lay out a bunch of What-if settings like "What if the Nazis won?" or "What if Rome never fell?". There's also Dungeon Fantasy, which is a Powered by GURPS module which gives you pre-built character templates and enemy stat blocks and adventures and stuff. If you're used to D&D, it's a fairly gentle transition with familiar themes. The thing about the challenges and side interactions though, is that once you get a feel for setting difficulty modifiers, you can import that stuff from anywhere. The best part of GURPS is running homebrew. Its strength is that you can write any scenario you want, with the confidence that you *can* make it work mechanically somehow. The people on the Discord are generally pretty helpful if you need help, although just about anything you want to do has already been theory crafted on the Steve Jackson Games forum.

Very rarely I just wish I could be a player in a PF2E game for once because I love playing support classes