22 | They/Them | Furry (Avian trash) | TTRPG Enthusiast, Player & GM (PF2e mainly) | Linux Sysadmin

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You are correct, the agile trait reduces the MAP penalty on its own attack and isn’t dependent on the previous attack being agile.

    In general, for a small damage dice size difference, I believe agile is about equal in damage on average. Consider that for an average 1 damage difference between a d6 and d8, agile will miss 5% less and crit 5% more at MAP-4 than a d8 at MAP-5. This difference becomes even greater at MAP-10 vs MAP-8, becoming now actually wholly worth it. However, the value of a third attack is dubious as usual and so while it is strictly better here on average that doesn’t mean it’s actually worth doing (and if it’s not worth doing, then whatever value it has here is most likely to be discarded)

    However, a dice size increase is worth roughly two traits (you can see this by comparing average quantity of traits across damage dice size) which means agile is one trait worth two during MAP as it averages out to equal with a weapon of a bigger size.

    This means that a d4 weapon with like 5 traits where one of them is agile has a ‘trait’ economy of 6 traits during MAP as it averages a d6 weapon’s damage but still retains the other 4 traits it only gets due to being d4 compared to the 2-3 total that a d6 might have.

    I don’t have raw numbers for an extreme example I.e. d12 and a d4 agile but the rule of thumb is it pans out super slightly ahead on average in small dice size differences iirc

    EDIT: To note, this doesn’t factor in situations like “what if the monster is one hit from death and I need more accuracy to secure that it dies NOW because it’s a priority target?” as it is difficult to calculate in whiteboard math, but it’s entirely possible that agile pulls ahead with weighted statistics.

    Also to note is this doesn’t necessarily apply to monsters. They have higher stats for the same level and typically have greater accuracy and their trait economy is different. It’s possible that their inflated accuracy makes agile less useful, or that their inflated damage makes the extra crit chance from agile better, but I can’t quite say off the cuff.

    Still, the TLDR I suppose is that agile is good if it affords you a trait that a weapon of one damage dice size bigger would never have. Say, if you can’t get a d6 weapon with Reach, then an agile d4 weapon with Reach is just as good during MAP, but also has reach. That’s about it.




  • Oh no, I wasn’t assuming as such! Sorry, I tend to get really into the weeds with my responses and tend to be really formal in the way I write and I have been made aware that can come off aggressive without context before. :s I wasn’t trying to force my opinion, just trying to be as thorough as possible in explaining what I meant since you asked.

    I was trying to explain that I really was glad it worked great for you, that wasn’t sarcastic! But it’s just that I’ve seen it break down really badly for tables that are less experienced with TTRPGs and since OP was so close to finishing his game and I couldn’t know that much about his table’s level of experience and they had spent so much time with a single game, I felt it’d make the most sense to just wrap up and start over with fresh eyes since it’s a brand new system.





  • And that’s great that it’s worked for you - but for a majority of tables, especially those that only play 5e, it can be a challenge to adapt to another system. There is a tendency to assume things work the same that needs to be carefully picked apart, and one of these things is the split between individual power and party power on the player side. On the GM side, it’s the tendency to be fast and loose with encounter balancing.

    I’ve seen a lot of tables try to start playing PF2e carrying over from 5e and if their heart isn’t in it with the notion of trying an altogether new, different system (rather than just “D&D but…”) then it tends to end pretty disastrously - GMs homebrewing right out the gate in ways that make the game hard-to-impossible to enjoy or building insanely difficult encounters, players building their character exclusively for individual synergy without thinking of the party and showing a lack of understanding of using skill actions to assist each other, or a lack of understanding of how to manipulate the action economy of the enemy.

    Any one of these things individually is something that can be slowly learned out of with time, but a lot of times I see these happen at the same time and you end up with lopsided parties that don’t know how to assist each other against insanely difficult encounters and it’s just TPK after TPK which leaves people with a bad taste and perception of the system, when the system itself isn’t at fault here.

    I see that you moderate the TTRPGs community over at your instance (which I’ve greatly enjoyed btw) so I can only assume you have experience with a lot of systems, in which case I can understand why it seems a lot simpler to you. But for tables where people have only played 5e, or have played other systems but in recent memory have only played 5e (I don’t know which OP’s is, but at the very least the latter given they’ve played 5e the last 3 years) there can be a lot of friction.

    Additionally, I wasn’t recommending the characters be carried over except at level 1 or abruptly ending the campaign when I said ‘start over’. I was recommending “finish your campaign in 5e first and then start over in PF2e with fresh eyes.” Characters in PF2e are very different and people tend to have built expectations of what they can and can’t do by now or a specific mix of mechanic and flavor that will be different in PF2e coming from 5e. Some people are okay with that, some really aren’t. But everyone is okay with starting a new game, so finishing up your ongoing one rather than swapping halfway is the safe route.

    What works for a table might not work for another, and the perspective I got of OP’s table is that they would benefit from starting over once their 5e campaign finished.

    EDIT: Especially given that OP was already 1-2 weeks from finishing his campaign, wrapping it up was the most sensible thing.




  • Seems to be the general consensus from what I’ve seen any time it’s been brought up even on the PF2e Discord. You just can’t do it off of a single effect, i.e. Ward Medic, but they can be healed individually with Treat Wounds.

    And yes, the Eidolon can indeed be healed as per the Eidolon feature of the Summoner class.

    Damage taken by either you or the eidolon reduces your Hit Points, while healing either of you recovers your Hit Points.

    So it seems pretty clear Treat Wounds works on them. If they couldn’t be injured, then they would be immune to damage which they aren’t. Inferring otherwise is imposing the flavor of ‘damage to the connection’ or something over rules, which I’m not a fan of in a system as tight as PF2e. (That’s just me, though.)


  • Yes, those are the rules.

    Like with your actions, if you and your eidolon are both subject to the same effect that affects your Hit Points, you apply those effects only once (applying the greater effect, if applicable). For instance, if you and your eidolon get caught in an area effect that would heal or damage you both, only the greater amount of healing or damage applies.

    If both are affected by the exact same effect, then yeah, it only applies once.

    The Treat Wounds effect is different since it’s not the exact same effect, they’re still separate entities and it’s not applied simultaneously. hence the question. General consensus seems to be that you can, just not simultaneous (i.e. ward medic)





  • Regarding number one - If you’re coming back from a long time away and haven’t done any quests at all, then I recommend doing quests. They unlock important content, and there’s a few that are necessary to be able to do Eidolons properly.

    As for the remainder of the questions, if you care about meta (or at least some form of guide on making weapons work) and the performance of weapons/frames then I recommend you check out the tier lists and build guides on Overframe. Not all super upvoted builds are up to date or great, so I recommend you look around on each piece of equipment, read the comments on the builds, and scrutinize for yourself on what you think might work and be good.


  • I would personally recommend you start over at level 1, and discard any notions of how things might work that you carry over from other systems (even besides 5e).

    In general for TTRPGs in the larger sphere, every system is its own thing, and looking at rules with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions of how it might work tends to help interpret and understand them better without tripping yourself up on what you thought they might be.

    The rules are legally free and you can check them out in places like the Second Edition section of Archives of Nethys and PF2eTools (if that name sounds familiar and you have concerns, worry not! They have contact with Paizo to keep them in the clear and avoid content that doesn’t fall under the free use rules, and were even present at PaizoCon 2023!).

    If you want an excellent tutorial to get started, the Beginner Box is great at teaching as you go. Hope you enjoy the system!




  • Hi! Dunno if you recognize me from our small chats the other day, SenseiRat. I’ve decided to migrate here, both to have a curated local feed of stuff I care about but also because .world was becoming a little too big (and decentralization is the point, after all!) and unmoderated for my liking (started being defederated by other instances and everything…), hopefully that’s ok!

    Are there any plans on hosting a Matrix server or Mastodon/Clackey instance to go along with the Lemmy? Mastodon has dice.camp (which I wish was Clackey, the interface for it is a bit better), I suppose, but we’re sorely missing a Matrix for TTRPGs/Pathfinder - the public ones I could find, at least, were months-long dead with no members in it unfortunately.

    I know there’s the PF2e Discord, but with Discord’s recent changes and all of the stuff with Reddit I’ve started to really favor federated alternatives.