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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve heard that 1e and 2e are very different games, but I haven’t played 1e. What I like about 2e is the consistency of mechanics - for example, pretty much every spell and effect with a saving throw has results based on whether you rolled a Critical Success (10+DC or more), Success (>=DC), Failure (<DC), or Critical Failure (DC-10 or less). This applies to attacks as well, any time you roll 10 or higher than the enemy’s AC you get a Critical Hit which doubles the damage you deal. There’s also a standard set of conditions that all spells, special abilities, etc. draw from that are clearly explained.

    I don’t have any serious experience GMing 2e, but everyone I’ve talked to online says that the encounter math is extremely well thought-out. Whereas some TTRPGs value simplicity, or the player power fantasy, or any number of things - diversity is the strength of the hobby - PF2e’s focuses are balance and consistency. You can still have a ton of fun in PF2e (I smile when I think of the time my three party members and I held off no fewer than thirteen enemy bandits in one frantic combat), but you can reliably expect two parties at a given level to be about the same power level, building your encounters accordingly. A big part of this is the fact that rolling for stats is a variant rule rather than the default. You get fixed bonuses to certain stats during character creation based on your ancestry, background, and class. Your health starts at a number based on your ancestry, class, and Constitution modifier. Your health goes up a fixed amount every level based on your class and Constitution modifier. And finally, the full multiclassing system that exists in D&D is replaced with the Archetype system by which you can pick a feature of another class, or just favoring a specific playstyle, every time you get a class feat. (A popular variant rule that a lot of tables use is the Free Archetype rule, where you get a free Archetype feat in addition to your class feats. Helps spice up the build variety without letting things get out of control.)

    If you’re curious about playing Pathfinder Second Edition, you can read all of the rules text for everything they’ve ever published on Archives of Nethys for free thanks to a special partnership Paizo has with that site and the very permissive license that Paizo uses. Foundry VTT also has legendary support for the system. If you like books, you can buy PDFs for a steep discount on Paizo’s website.


    • On Sundays, I play Pathfinder Second Edition, more specifically the Fate walkers campaign.
    • On Tuesdays, I play Star Wars Saga Edition, a homebrew dark side campaign.
    • On Saturdays, I ordinarily have a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign going on, but my GM is laying the groundwork for the rest of our adventure so we’re on hiatus.

    They’re all tons of fun. I also have a solo game which I mentioned in another reply.


  • Right now I have a very solid rotation of TTRPGs:

    • On Sundays, I play Pathfinder Second Edition with some people I met online.
    • On Tuesdays, I play Star Wars Saga Edition with people I’ve known for years.
    • On Saturdays, I ordinarily play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e, but the campaign is sorta on hiatus right now while the GM prepares for the next leg of our adventure.

    I also have a solo game of Pathfinder 2e using the Mythic Gamemaster Emulator going on that is just… insane, it really went out of control fast. It started with three guys, Dave, Grimgir, and Goru, who wanted to find Dave’s missing father. They went to a place a few days’ journey away from the capital and came back to find that the local wizard academy had started a coup so they could have their own independent government, Dave’s dad is a massive criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and he got turned in to the government by the revolution he helped start. Where I last left off, Dave and co. ended the siege of the academy by deactivating their defenses from the outside, and then asked dad why he did it. Turns out he had sold his soul to a devil long before Dave was born in exchange for a perfect marriage and a happy family; they found that out moments before justice was carried out on him.

    Radio is one of the most complicated fields of electrical engineering. What should work doesn’t, and what shouldn’t work does. It’s amazing that these little gizmos work at all, given that the guy who discovered radio waves for the first time said he thought it was completely pointless. When my class wrote an essay on the most influential technologies of the early 20th century, everyone else wrote about the car. I wrote about the radio, because it paved the way for nearly every wireless technology we have today. If radio didn’t exist, we’d all be stuck on landlines and ethernet forever.








  • Maybe not you personally, but locking people’s digital character sheets behind a subscription service, refusing to provide PDFs of their printed materials, and most recently DMCAing content creators who showed any footage of the inside of the new PHB (which was being sold at GenCon), all strike me as anti-consumer behavior. Meanwhile, like he said, you can find the rules for just about everything Paizo has published online, legally, and they encourage you to do so. You can buy a PDF version of all their books on their website for a fraction of the cost of the physical volume. There are so many third-party tools available for free thanks to their generous use of the OGL/ORC licenses that it’s hard to know which one to use.

    I do understand the point about familiarity, though. If you’re already running a game, or multiple games even, that’s going to be a huge hurdle.