I recently heard about Mothership from some YouTubers and decided to run a one-shot for a couple of guys in my Pathfinder 2e group. I was really impressed by the way that a more rules-light system naturally encourages more player engagement and creativity. We will probably end up playing a lot more of it in the future.

This guy breaks down just how bad the layout of the new PHB is. The cross referencing is non-existent and the subsections seem to go in the order someone thought of them. I'm sadly unsurprised that they've not improved on any of these problems which existed in the original 5e PHB.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/26511521

So, if you're unaware, the basic math of PF2e's armour items assumes that for light and medium armour, (item bonus + dex cap) = 5, and for heavy armour, = 6. This means that as long as you can pick an armour that has a lower dex cap than your dex bonus, you are expected to be getting either 5 or 6 AC from your armour.

With all that said, there are a ton of armours out there that offer some kind of tradeoff, where that formula doesn't hold. For example, the Armoured Coat gives +4 AC between item bonus and dex cap, but it has the flexible trait which negates the check penalty to athletics and acrobatics checks. In my mind, that's a crazy tradeoff to make. The extra AC is so much more important.

At the end of the day though, I don't have the time to analyze the tradeoff offered by all of these "sub-optimal" armours. So yeah, I'd love to hear if anyone has experience with an armour item that yields less than 5 AC (or 6 for heavy armour) and yet the tradeoff was actually worth it for them.

So, if you're unaware, the basic math of PF2e's armour items assumes that for light and medium armour, (item bonus + dex cap) = 5, and for heavy armour, = 6. This means that as long as you can pick an armour that has a lower dex cap than your dex bonus, you are expected to be getting either 5 or 6 AC from your armour.

With all that said, there are a ton of armours out there that offer some kind of tradeoff, where that formula doesn't hold. For example, the Armoured Coat gives +4 AC between item bonus and dex cap, but it has the flexible trait which negates the check penalty to athletics and acrobatics checks. In my mind, that's a crazy tradeoff to make. The extra AC is so much more important.

At the end of the day though, I don't have the time to analyze the tradeoff offered by all of these "sub-optimal" armours. So yeah, I'd love to hear if anyone has experience with an armour item that yields less than 5 AC (or 6 for heavy armour) and yet the tradeoff was actually worth it for them.

The NPC gallery from the legacy GMG wasn't reprinted in GMC. No more generic "bandit" "mad scientist", "assassin", "priest", "necromancer", "gang leader"

These had a lot of value for telling the sort of stories I like to tell in my games, which are less about killing unequivocally evil "monsters" and more about regular people who may be morally complex and provoke more interaction from the players.

I'm well aware one can simply use legacy content, but that ignores that some of these had mechanics that have been revised in the remaster, and they were an important part of the toolkit provided to GMs in the GMG. Right now, the GM Core feels very lacking in terms of providing support for creating a cast of NPCs in adventures. There's literally a half a page dedicated to NPCs and it basically just says "make 'em up". Saying "You can use legacy content" is not a valid point when these new books are supposed to serve as a foundation for the system standing on their own.

Additionally, the official Paizo FoundryVTT bestiary portraits module, which I paid good money for, appears to have removed the portraits for these generic NPCs when the remaster content was added to the system. The realization of that was actually the thing that prompted this post. I was setting up an encounter for my players and was confused as to why the "Antipaladin" art was this instead of this. I am almost certain that before the remaster it used the art from the GMG for those tokens.

Background:

I'm running the Pathfinder 2e Abomination Vaults adventure for a group of 5 players, though I've set it in my own homebrew setting and have not shied away from deviating from the published adventure. I'll try not to, but I may let slip some minor AV spoilers

The players have just reached the end of book 1, and are about to go into book 2. At this point, about a month of in-game time has passed since the adventure began, and one week into the adventure there was a big supernatural event which made big news around the town that the adventure is set in. I like to play up the verisimilitude of the setting by having NPCs and the world react to the things that happen, as well as to the passage of time.

One thing I've come up with which I'm excited to see play out is that enough time has passed that word has spread around the local area about this megadungeon that has been discovered near the town. The players have been telling everyone who will listen about this heretofore undiscovered complex. In my mind, this would mean that other parties of adventurers would come to the town with the intent of doing the same thing the players are doing: looting dungeon, killing baddies, leveling up, getting rich and famous.

I've created a rival party of five adventurers of the same level as the players. This rival party is called "The Vanguard Edge" (or simply "The Edge"). I've spent a chunk of the last few days making notes on how to RP and employ The Edge. Here's what I've got so far:

The party is likely to try to join forces with The Vanguard Edge. This should never be possible.

The Edge don't follow the same rules as other NPCs. Think of them as a group of DM-controlled player characters. They know the rules of adventuring and they think like players.

The Edge are not villains. They are fundamentally "good guys", but their goal is to eat the party's lunch. They want to go into the Abomination Vaults and find all the cool loot first

In general, the Edge fulfill the negative stereotypes that most people have of adventurers. They are demanding, dismissive, and arrogant. They flaunt their wealth and brag about their exploits, they get bored when they go too long without fighting something. They sometimes speak in slightly more metagame terms, such as talking about their hopes to "level up" and "gain experience".

If the party ever shares useful information with The Edge, they will look at it with some skepticism. The members of the Edge would never dream of sharing Intel with other adventurers.

The Edge will occasionally have reached certain places first. This should be used sparingly, and only when it is a real gut punch for the party. It should be easy to tell where they have been, because they are completely unsubtle in their approach to adventuring.

Sometimes the implication of treasure can be added to the adventure, but with the added implication that the Edge got to it first. Maybe Abomination Vaults doesn't explicitly mention treasure in some room, but there was some in there, and the Edge already took it.

If an encounter is about to turn into a TPK, the Edge can show up to save the PCs. But they will never let them live it down.

Those are the notes I've made so far on how to use this new element of my campaign. I'm curious if anyone out there has any thoughts, either in things I've noted or things I've missed. I'd love folks to give their feedback

Thanks in advance!

I wasn't 100% sure this was a problem, as I had noticed a lot more people commenting what appeared to be static image responses to comments. But there's this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/16932878 which makes it easy to be sure that in fact they are definitely GIFs, and they don't play when you click on them. It just opens the first frame of the GIF like a static image.

I thought something was causing people to double post more recently, but after testing voting on some examples, I'm pretty sure posts are getting duplicated by the app.

The game seems to downscale and blur all textures, so the only thing that looks sharp is text and 3d models. Unfortunately some of the UI text seems to actually be a rendered texture, so the text of some UI elements can look blurry and pixelated. It also seems that the blurring is a live process, not a preprocess. This means that a lot of the UI elements are constantly flickering on top of being blurry.

Overall I love the game FWIW. I picked it up this week and love the gameplay loop. I'm just amazed it gets the green checkmark despite having such glaring UI issues with the default graphics settings (which are ostensibly tailored to the Deck)

Can anyone tell me if this can be fixed?

Edit: I had half-rate shading turned on and didn't realize it. I'm an idiot.

I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn't the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it's not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I'm okay with it if our conversations aren't private, but I'd like to know that I'm not giving unfettered access to all of my phone's systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?

I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn't the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it's not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I'm okay with it if our conversations aren't private, but I'd like to know that I'm not giving unfettered access to all of my phone's systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?