Droll Initiative

(Before I begin, I made a mistake in my previous post, where I thought there were only multiclass archetypes and class archetypes. There are also plain archetypes, separate from both. Oops. Carrying on…)

It’s been a few months since I last wrote about PF2E, and in the meantime I’ve bought quite a few of the books, watched several hours of YouTube videos, and even played in a one-shot. It’s quickly become my favorite d20-based fantasy game. I’ve collected a handful of thoughts and observations, which I’ll organize into player and GM sections.

Player

• I still can’t get over how much D&D 4E influence has made its way into this game. There’s obvious stuff like Focus Spells being an adaptation of Encounter Powers, and the heavy keywording of equipment traits, but also how strongly teamwork is emphasized. Part of 4E’s allure to me was how everyone had a role to play in the party, and team composition mattered.
  • While I love 4E, the roles were hard-coded and inflexible. If you wanted to play a Fighter, you were going to be a Defender with a Striker. PF2E gives classes a bit more flexibility into how they approach their place in the party, which I prefer. I know this requires a bit more of a learning curve, however.
• Having Archetypes handle customization outside of a given class is brilliant. The foundations can be found in 4E’s multiclass system, but PF2E expands them into a full, opt-in customization system. I love that it’s just one system that covers multiclassing, variant class features, and diversification, with only minor rules changes between the three. This is awesome for players because we’re no longer locked into a particular path for how our character will progress, and it also means that “breadth” doesn’t have to mean “more combat options”.
  • On that note, I love that Archetype Feats are deliberately undertuned for their level. You trade power for breadth, and that’s very much in keeping with other decisions in the game (most notably, jack-of-all-trades (sub)classes like the Alchemist and the Warpriest).

GM

• Prepping fights couldn’t be easier. This means that I can focus less on paperwork and more on the fiction that might play out. Plus… maybe it’s just me, but I found 4E prep overwhelming, as I felt like I had pressure on me to make sure every battle felt like a setpiece. I think PF2E’s decision to allow more volitional movement, and less forced movement, loosens terrain prep for me as well.
• There are so many options for Ancestry and Class. I was a big fan of the weird-ass shit they dropped into 4E towards the end of its lifecycle, so no surprise that I like it in PF2E as well. Aside from being absolute catnip to me as a player, all of this gives me ready-made content for me to build out a custom world, if I so choose.
• There’s a certain sense of modality in a lot of TTRPGs, between “Combat” and “Not-Combat”. “Not-Combat” is loose and freeform, but things change when the GM draws a map and minis are placed down. I like both sides of the divide, mind you, but the change from freeform, conversational play to rules-forward, board-gamey combat play is a bit jarring. PF2E, for its part, gives rules for moments where it’s not quite combat, but isn’t downtime either. That’s good. Forbidden Lands has a similar love of out-of-combat rules and procedures, and for all of my gripes about that system, I feel like it makes the game feel more cohesive, and less like two games grafted on to one another.
• One minor gripe about the system, before I close up. The system for detecting spells as they’re being cast is a bit clunky for in-person play. Basically, RAW, your character only knows what spell is being cast if they prepared it or it’s in their repertoire. Otherwise, you need a feat to possibly know spells from a certain tradition, and it’s a secret roll. I’d probably take the advice the book gives and, just for this scenario, make the roll non-secret. That way, I’m spared having to know what spells the character knows before I describe what goes down. On a virtual table, I’m sure it’s a lot less cumbersome, but this tweak saves me the step of looking over a spell sheet.

I didn’t think I had room for rules-heavy games anymore. Years ago, I tried to learn Pathfinder 1E, but gave up halfway through rolling up a Rogue. I got really into 13th Age as my preferred D&D-alike, loving its freewheeling design and “stripped down 4E” vibe. More recently, I’ve ventured into FitD, PbtA, and other story-first, rules-light game systems, as well as the weirder, DYI side of the OSR.

But something tugged at me. I missed the strategic, granular gameplay of maps-and-minis gameplay that 4E excelled at. Sure, I had Lancer and Emberwind, both exemplary games. Couldn’t I let another one into my collection? I had looked at Pathfinder 2E (henceforth referred to as PF2E) a few times, but a few things made me bounce off:

1. My word, those are a lot of pages to read.
2. The character sheet’s color scheme is an affront to all that is good and pure in this world.
3. I already had a negative reaction to the previous edition.

But still, something tugged at me.

I heard good things about the action economy. While I couldn’t wrap my head around how the degrees-of-success mechanic would play out, it sounded novel enough. Then I read someone on RPG.net talk about how PF2E handled multiclassing in a balanced, modular way, and I could resist no longer. I ran down to my FLGS and bought the Core Rulebook.

I’m really glad I did. This game is great.

So, what’s great about it?

I wasn’t far into the introduction when a paragraph leapt out at me:

Pathfinder is a game for everyone, regardless of their age, gender, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other identities and life experiences. It is the responsibility of all of the players, not just the GM, to make sure the table is fun and welcoming to all.

This should be the lowest of low-hanging fruit, to acknowledge that it’s everyone’s job to make the experience fun and welcoming, but this hasn’t been the case. Throughout the book, and sprinkled into appropriate sidebars throughout the books I’ve acquired since, are passages reinforcing this central tenet. Safety tools, callouts when monster themes might be too much, you name it. Good stuff all around.

But enough about that. What are the things that make the game fun?

Balanced, tactical combat: This was a huge draw for me. The encounter math is spelled out very clearly, making encounter design the easiest it’s been in years. From the player’s side, each class has something meaningful to contribute. Martial characters tend to have a bunch of options to squeeze advantage out of the action economy, while spellcasters trade action efficiency for potent abilities.

Progression with meaningful choice: As characters go up in level, they are confronted with a choice of some sort of Feat. This is probably the most daunting part of the game, but also the most rewarding. There don’t seem to be straight-up bad choices, and the retraining guidelines are generous if you make a choice that doesn’t work out. This means that, no matter if you’re a caster or a martial class, every level-up means you not only get something new to play with (no dead levels!), but you get your choice of things to play with.

Skills matter: Something that’s bothered me about d20 fantasy games is how skill usage tends to get siloed off into exploration, and mostly ignored once combat starts (aside from maybe Stealth). This bothered me especially in 4E, since terrain and forced movement were so important, but nobody really leveraged Athletics or Acrobatics to use them to their advantage. I can’t recall anyone using Intimidation to scare enemies into surrender. Most damningly, while there were rules for knocking over loose walls or whatnot for dramatic terrain effects, they were often inferior in outcome to the powers on your character sheet. So why bother?

PF2E takes a different approach. Skills all can do something basic, but if your character has at least one degree of training in a skill, they can often do fantastic effects that can fundamentally reshape the situation, and there’s reason to do them in the heat of battle, as they can often be a better option than swinging a sword a whole bunch for your actions (thanks to the Multiple Attack Penalty). Is your Fighter trained in Indimidate? Why not set the party up for success by Demoralizing your foe? A one-round -1 to defenses doesn’t seem like a lot, but since this also affects the crit range, a small bonus means a lot.

Outside of combat, skills still matter in big ways. Aside from the usual exploration and interaction skills that are commonplace among this sort of game, perhaps my favorite thing is the Medicine skill. Not only does it stabilize the dying, treat diseases, and other expected usages, it allows anyone to be the party healer. That’s right. Your Rogue can be the team medic and get everyone back up on their feet. You don’t need a healbot Cleric, though a lot of classes still get some support/healing options, if that’s an enjoyable play experience for a player.

Archetypes! Are! Awesome!: At the beginning of this review, I mentioned how I had heard that multiclassing was handled in a really cool, balanced way. This is the Archetype system: an optional set of substitution Feats that allows your character to grow in ways outside of their Class. They’re separate from the main Class writeups, which allows them to be tuned so as to not overpower your base Class (nor anyone else). But Archetypes do more than just this! The Advanced Player’s Guide has Class Archetypes, which allow for specialization and variation within a Class. What’s more, the requirements are often easy to slot into just about any character concept you have. Your Druid could be an Herbalist, for example… but so could your Barbarian.

Amazing support: Something I can’t get over is how all of the rules are available online… for free. That’s tremendous. Not only can I “try before I buy” (which I absolutely did), the rules are there in their entirety to help me run games. One of the things that’s driven me off from running 5E is the presence of spell lists in creature write-ups. While they’re present in PF2E as well, the fact that the spell lists are hyperlinks to the actual spells eliminates this pain point.

Closing Thoughts

Wow, that was a lot, but oddly fitting for such a mammoth book. It’s an incredibly dense, rules-heavy system, but learning it is giving me that feeling of knowledge interlocking and clicking into place that I got when mastering 4E. They’re wildly different games, of course, but PF2E has won me over in a big way, which is something I never thought would happen.

I have a post that I’m brewing in my head about a game that I never thought I’d love but do, but Judd Karlman wrote a really touching look back at his own experience with D&D over the years and I felt the urge to write my own. I need to do this because I felt so much what he wrote. I don’t like reminiscing about decades gone by, because it inevitably makes me sad, but hey, the oppressive heat of Summer is finally giving way to the first hints of Autumn down here in North Carolina, and I feel it’s just right to be a bit melancholic and wistful.

Mom and Dad had a bureau in our home’s foyer. I think it was the type that had a fold-out desk that we never used. It was more of a decoration than functional storage, and they kept all sorts of stuff in there that I guess they didn’t know a better place for.

One of the drawers contained a bunch of odd games. I remember we had a copy of Mastermind, Regatta, Stock Market, and probably some other ones. But most importantly, a blue box with a striking tableau – a fearsome dragon squaring off against an adventuring party! This was the classic Holmes Blue Box, and I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. But it had funny-looking dice and a wax crayon to rub on their sides, which was good enough for me.

I met a kid at school a year or two later who also liked this sort of stuff. He had Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and it made even less sense to my young brain. But he and I sort of ran with it, cobbling together a ruleset from the stuff we figured out and our own imaginations. It was a shambolic mess of a system, no doubt, but we had fun.

2nd Edition came out when I was in middle school. I remember sinking every bit of my allowance into buying books and taking them to school to read between classes. I somehow managed to get other friends roped into playing, and for someone as terribly awkward as I was, this provided an activity I could finally share with others.

In high school, I cobbled together whatever Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft adventures I could get ahold of into a semblance of a complete campaign. It was incredibly cringey for the most part, looking back – all of the Dark Sun and Planescape Easter Eggs I threw in just because, some really questionable homebrew ancestries, and the edgelordiest Drow edgelord antagonist I’ve ever seen – but we were teenagers. I remember the party finally dying, getting queued through some bureaucratic afterlife straight out of Beetlejuice, and ascending to godhood as a called-in favor.

Then… I just sort of burned out on D&D.

I can’t say why. Maybe it just reached saturation in my head. Maybe it was going off to college and getting exposed to Shadowrun and Vampire. Maybe… D&D stopped being a thing that carried nigh-totemic importance to me. I wanted something weirder, grittier, different, though to this day I have no idea what that actually ended up being.

The late 90s and early 00s were a blur. Lots of White Wolf. Ex Libris Nocturnum. RPG.net. Unknown Armies. Tribe 8. Blue Planet. Lots of misusing Forge terminology. I skipped 3rd Edition D&D because I was still burned out and, being the contrarian that I am, got irritated by the OGL glut. Maybe this is what Judd was talking about – the game went from something I zealously tore through and pored over to something that was just there to play or leave.

I recall having high-faluting ideas about character immersion and how system didn’t really matter. I remember thinking and spouting this while neck-deep in the Mage: the Awakening mechanics, so you could say I was probably full of shit. I definitely do.

I was in my thirties when a Sunday-night Descent campaign sputtered out and it was floated to give 4th Edition D&D a try. I loved it so much that I bought all the books pretty much on the spot. I didn’t understand the vitriol dumped on it by the Internet. Someone on RPG.net mentioned a lot of the criticism levied against this edition was the same levied against 3E, and I wondered what in the culture had changed. I ran a few lackluster campaigns, but had a blast as a player.

I was about to leave my thirties when 5th Edition dropped, and I gave it a fair shake. However, I felt it was once again a game to pick up and play, and that’s it. I still buy the books every now and then, mostly to have something to talk about with friends, and I occasionally play in an adventure or two. It’s okay. I pick it up, I get some enjoyment, and then I put it down.

I feel weird about my relationship to the game now. It’s a game put out by a large corporation, and I have iffy feelings about that. It’s not just a game brand now, but a social signifier, a hashtag, a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle sold as much as a bunch of books and dice. I’m not saying that it’s bad, but that it’s changed so much as to be an entirely different beast from that old blue box. But that’s always been the case. The game I left on the humid shores of the summer before college was also different from that blue box. Same with the pickup 4E dungeon crawl.

Maybe I’m chasing a high I’ll never get again. One of holding a system and all of the worlds it supports in my head. One where each rule clicking snugly and surely into place gives me a jolt of satisfaction. One where the game ceases being just a thing to pick up and once again is something that beckons me to peel back its mysteries.

Eventually, travel back and forth to friends’ houses put too much wear on the Blue Box. Its cardboard shell crumpled. The books’ staples rusted in the humid, salty air of my hometown. One of the books was unsalvageable; the other one I think I gave to my friend with the AD&D books.

I still have the d10 from the dice set though. I’m keeping that one.

I posed a question on the Emberwind Discord this morning: what about magic items? The game doesn’t currently have rules for them, and I somewhat understand the argument for their exclusion. This is, after all, a game that is designed to be approachable by new players, and the combat rules, where I have typically seen the most use of magic items in other games, is plenty crunchy. On the other hand, magic items are a staple of fantasy fiction, so their inclusion seems like a fun idea.

Before I dive in, though, I’d like to establish the goal of this approach. First, I want to leverage the mechanics already present, partly because I’m not sufficiently confident in my skills to want to tinker around with major changes to the system, but also because I want to keep these additions to be approachable by newcomers. Second, I want them to mean something different to how typical fantasy games represent them. I want abilities to remain the starring feature of the character, not something the game expects you to have, lest you fall behind in efficacy. To that point, magic items should be rare, possibly even unique, and worthy of their own quest. Third, I want to have the options available to make them stand out as otherworldly, weird objects.

How to make a magic item (and what not to do)

A magic item can be anything – a deck of cards, a sword, a suit of leather armor, you name it. The magic item’s abilities should mimic the Keepsake system – a consumable bonus that refreshes after a period of time. The Hero’s Guide has a list of good Keepsake abilities, so use them. Another idea I had was to allow the use of a Class Action outside of the wielder’s Class, once per Milestone (I suggest sticking with the abilities tagged General) or allowing a different Maneuver to the one they possess, again once per Milestone. Any of these should work, although if your table allows the use of different Class Abilities, the GM should be alert for “super-combos” that entirely break the balance of the game.

I would not recommend emulating D&D and just slapping a static +1 on the item. I want the usage of magic items to be strategic, not just something you can call on consistently.

How to make a magic item… weird

Option 1: Minor Effects

Think about something weird or cool the magic item could bring to the character’s story. These minor effects shouldn’t have an effect on skill checks or combat outside of some extremely clever usage, but they should provide a strange, possibly whimsical element to the fiction.

Examples include:

• A deck of cards that shuffles itself when nobody’s looking
• A suit of armor that never gets dirty
• A cloak that can billow dramatically, as if caught up in an imaginary gust of wind, upon command
• An otherwise normal-looking sword that, when swung, makes sweet lightsaber noises

If you have a copy, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything for D&D 5th Edition has a lot of inspiring examples.

Option 2: Living Items

Taking a cue from 13th Age, perhaps your world’s magic items have a degree of self-awareness. Perhaps the magic that lives inside of them bestowed upon them limited intelligence, enough for them to communicate via flashes of emotion.

Come up with a compelling personality quirk like likes the sound or rhyming couplets or can’t resist pulling harmless pranks on other party members. They don’t compete with the character’s established personality, but having a bit of a give-and-take between item and wielder has excellent roleplaying potential!

Recently, I’ve been revisiting Emberwind, a really clever indie RPG that, at least to me, feels like a super-streamlined take on the tactical D&D 4E model. There’s a lot to like about the game’s welcoming, approachable structure that makes it easy for new players to get into, as well as the ability to combo abilities and craft synergistic builds that should appeal to knowledgeable power-gamers. It’s got a wonderful class system, with subclasses coming soonish. But something that might be missing for your table are Ancestries. The game avoids statistical differences between a Human and a Dwarf, if they exist in your setting, and for the most part, I’m okay with this omission. But if you’re not, here are some approaches I would suggest (and one that I wouldn’t).

How I Wouldn’t Do It – Mechanical Bonuses

Let’s get this out of the way first – I think straight mechanical bonuses (be they to CAP values, skill values, or whatever else) are a bad idea. I don’t think it’s a good idea for one Ancestry to be de-facto better at a given thing than another. Setting aside real-world racial stereotyping (although that sure is a thing that this approach echoes), choosing to be one type of playable creature versus another just for the stat bonus makes for kind of boring game worlds.

Expanding the Keepsake system

In Emberwind, every character gets a Keepsake, a little something that acts like a rechargeable consumable. They don’t have to be tangible items like lockets, either – everyone gets what’s called an “Emberwind Spark”, which to me is less “physical item that my character has on their person” and more “essence of heroism that exists because my character is a main character in the story”.

To use this, the GM or table have to decide on how to implement this:

1. Give everyone a bonus Keepsake to reflect their Ancestry
2. Everyone’s Ancestry must be reflected in their free-choice Keepsake
3. Only the “default” Ancestry gets the Emberwind Spark, while others get their choice of a replacement Keepsake

Giving everyone an extra Keepsake probably makes the game slightly easier, and makes management a little more fiddly, but this might be a welcome trade-off, especially for veteran players. Personally, it still feels a little too close to static mechanical bonuses to be really palatable, but it’s leavened somewhat by a bit more looseness in the attribution, as well as the fact that Keepsakes aren’t always-on abilities.

Anchors and Deadweights

Anchors and Deadweights are fiction-based approaches to modifying skill rolls. They simply apply Advantage or Disadvantage to a roll, reflecting lived experience (good or bad) with an aspect of the world.

I’m taking inspiration from Whitehack’s Group system for this. If your character’s Ancestry has enough of an impact on your rolls, make it an Anchor, and choose an equivalent Deadweight. Maybe you’re playing a Drow, so you’d choose an Anchor like “the Underdark” with a Deadweight like “above-ground society”. It’s up to the GM or the table to decide how much a given Anchor/Deadweight are worth.

Which would I use?

Probably Anchors and Deadweights. These days, I generally prefer systems that only lightly touch the heavier, crunchier mechanics of a given game, especially one so intricate as Emberwind. That said, I know a lot of players like messing with systems, so the other options are examples of me doing that.

Though, truthfully, I don’t think I’d even use Anchors and Deadweights. I think the game’s just fine as-is, and if I were to use Ancestries, they’d just be role-playing prompts. If it’s good enough for Heart and Spire, it’s good enough for me.

• The game’s art is quite lovely. That’s probably a very un-controversial, quotidian opinion, but it’s true!
• The character structure – purely cosmetic/RP Ancestry, Classes, and Calling – which merges RP prompts with mechanics – is pretty neat. I like how the classes are all messed-up versions of D&D classes.
• Boy howdy, I found the organization of the book lacking. Like, take the bit about how taking Fallout clears Stress. Sure, it’s mentioned on the quick reference, but I’ve learned not to trust quick references until I can look them up in the actual text. The actual rule is not lumped in with the Fallout section, but rather dropped in with the healing rules. I sorta understand why, but it doesn’t flow as logically as I think it could. And I still don’t have a concrete definition of what “refresh dX” means. I had to infer its meaning, which isn’t good for someone new to the game as I was.
  Not a cardinal sin, but it was/is vexing.
• Trade was confusing, but once I understood the mechanics, it made sense. (Another victim of the less-than-stellar organizationof the book, perhaps?) Basically, if you need a d6 weapon, you need to trade a d6 treasure in exchange. Either that, or burn d6 worth of Supplies. They don’t explicitly say you can trade Supplies for other forms of healing, but if a player really wanted to trade one Stress track for another, I wouldn’t see why not.
• Speaking of interpretations and house rules, I’m glad there are a handful of optional rules. It’s good that the designers thought about flexibility.
• I think that the GM’s section has one of the best guidance for story games that I’ve read.
• Despite there being a good bunch of supplements for the game, the core book is complete. The supplements expand on concepts already established in the setting, but are entirely unnecessary to play. That�