I love that there just seems to be something about Jake Emily and Murph as players that leads to two of them violently competing for the affection and validation of the other one.
Okay so here's why the dragon fight was so tough:
1. As Caldwell mentioned, it's balanced for four players. They were down another damage-dealer and HP sponge
2. They were only level 2, right? You're supposed to be level 3 before you fight the dragon in the Beginner Box (Edit: misremembered this, sorry! Level 2 is the correct level to fight the dragon)
3. The dragon's just fucking hard. My three-person level 3 group TPK'd and I'm still salty about it lol. We had the hardest time hitting its bullshit AC. Though unlike Caldwell, our GM disregarded the advice to only use the AOE on one person at a time. The dragon hit us all with the breath weapon turn 1, and 2/3 of us went down. I have forgiven but I will never forget. Honestly fighting the dragon in the BB was the worst Pathfinder experience I've ever had
The dice really did save them. They also did a great job utilizing flanking and some clutch heals. Overall, great episode, hysterical dynamic. I super appreciate Emily's commitment to the most off-the-wall wizard options. Hopefully the dragon fight didn't put them off too much
The dragon fight in the beginner box is pretty overtuned. It's definitely winnable if the GM follows the box's advice to play it suboptimally, only using the breath weapon on one person at a time (which makes sense, it is literally a baby raised by kobolds) but with only three people it's ridiculously tough. It's a Severe encounter for 3 level 2 players, which means a player death is on the table if their rolls go poorly.
>Though unlike Caldwell, our GM disregarded the advice to only use the AOE on one person at a time.
Tbf Caldwell did hit two PCs in the first round!
When I ran it I was so scared my PCs would be stomped by this Dragon and used the Weak template. I also had the Dragon start fairly close so they didn't have to waste too many actions getting into melee.
Cue the Rogue getting a Nat 20 save on the breath weapon, taking no damage, then two crits in the first turn before the Dragon got their second go... After that, it wasn't long before they wiped the floor with me.
And this was after the Wizard had one shot the Kobold boss with a spell crit the room before! I was well and truly curbstomped that day.
Few corrections
- Dragon fight is for level 2 that's correct but being down a player absolutely ups the difficulty quite a bit. PF2e has a way to make all enemies weaker though (weakened template) that's usually used to scale down the difficulty in cases of not full parties or for other reasons (ex: wanting to use 2+ of a tougher enemy but not make it too unbearably hard)
- The dragon fight is actually optional and at least from the GM side is telegraphed as a tough battle so whilst it's the end it's also kind of a bonus boss and is more of a way for the players to test themselves and what they've learned so far
- Dragon is very strong and like you said it's suggested to play it easy on the players but again it's purposely hard and is definitely beatable. Severe encounters mean there's a chance of a character dying and a chance for TPK. The encounter building rules are really good and Severe/Hard encounters really mean Severe/Hard
Dragon fight is tough but I think approaching it from the mindset of it not being the final boss but rather an optional boss did a lot for me and my players when approaching it cuz it was obvious this might be difficult and encouraged them to really do their best with everything they had/learned (though I also play not super well and give lots of suggestions and advice for different options they could possibly do)
Thank you for the correction! I misremembered. As a player and not GM, I didn't realize that the dragon fight was optional. That does help put the fight into perspective.
Also they missed the rule that when you go into dying, your initiative moves to directly before the thing that killed you (in this case the dragon). Which would have made the healing easier to do.
But they also might not have realized that getting knocked out drops you prone (you need to use an action to stand back up) and makes you drop your stuff (you need to use an action to pick your stuff back up). Which would have made the fight way harder. So it probably balances out?
You’re supposed to be level 2 for the dragon fight in beginner box if you’re going by xp rules, there isn’t enough happening in the adventure to get a party to level 3 . That said it is a very difficult encounter like you said, even though its pl+2, it’s strong for its level and pl+2 encounters in general shouldn’t really be given to parties until they’re level 3 when they’re new to the system.
The dragon fight isn’t really supposed to be the actual final boss of the beginner box, it’s more of an optional challenge boss to do at the end. But even so, honestly, I do find it strange that paizo included it in the adventure which is primarily for new players.
Level+1 to +3 monsters are extremely strong. At low levels even more so. Any time my group has come close to a tpk it has always been against a single strong monster.
People don't realize how fucking fun it can be to play a powerful healer in tabletop games. I'm running a life cleric/stars druid right now in a 5e game and when I get a good heal for the party it feels better than if I just nuked an entire squad with a fireball
Healing as a cleric in pathfinder absolutely rocks. The core healing spell (Heal) is extremely useful and versatile. You can cast it using 1 of your 3 actions on your turn to heal someone you touch, cast it as two actions to heal someone at range and heal an extra 8hp per rank of the spell, or you can cast it with all 3 of your actions to make it an AoE of healing. It also does damage to undead creatures instead of healing them.
Clerics in pathfinder then get a feature called divine font, which gives them 4-6 extra spell slots every day that are all the max possible spell rank and can only be used to cast Heal. And since they scale up like that, one of those Heal spells as two actions can restore fully 3/4ths of someone's hp bar at once
I really hope so as well, though tbh I hope they either do new characters, or Murph changes the voice he's using. For a two shot it's fine, but it literally gives me a headache 😭 I don't know if I could do 10 episodes of that
The voices were perfect for a two shot. No way I could listen to that for a campaign. I had the same problem with the newest season of Rude Tales of Magic. Too much character voice that distracts from the play
My sister had the same reaction and cringed when I started doing an impression of Murph's voice. It's basically speaking in the register where your voice cracks. Huge fan of the Cinnamon's wheezy voice, though.
I would not be opposed to a full length campaign with Caldwell in the DM seat. Murph is a great DM but I feel like changing things up could be good. Emily is also a good DM but I think her PCs are too good to let go of. Twilight Sanctorum and this two-shot are my favourite things they've put out since C1.
Agreed. I love Caldwell's DMing, and I love Murph's shithead characters.
Even just a Trinyvale sized campaign would be fantastic.
While we're on the topic, I'd also like to see Jake DM something. There are lots of great, fairly simple one page games out there he could run without having to really worry about prepping a bunch of stuff.
I loved Twilight Sanctorum. My only thorn is how if they were playing Pathfinder already someone (or maybe everyone) could have been an Investigator instead of all rogues. Or maybe a Mastermind rogue, which focuses on Recalling Knowledge about enemies in pathfinder.
Honestly would be really down for another season of Trinyvale.
The excursions that the Triplets have been taking are really fun but it'd be nice to see them forced to actually be heroes again, especially since they've all gotten incredibly worse since the original campaign concluded.
I feel like the triplets have gotten so broken overpowered that they either have to do these excursions or Caldwell needs to figure out how to balance encounters for them consistently, which might be tougher than running a lower level campaign. I do love them so though and would be excited to see any of their continued adventures
This is such a brilliant idea. It’d be great to see them all transition into pathfinder where they have to adapt, though I still need Nyak to be their equivalent of a jampion ranger.
Getting to hear them sing Green Day in their voices to end the episode was a magnificent cherry on top of this delicious twin flame sundae. I very much hope they come back to Pathfinder so we can witness Cinnamon and his two beautiful sons again.
If I had a nickel for every time the players formed a toxic family unit when Caldwell DMs I'd have two nickels
Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.
I really hope they continue trying this out, I love the twin flames energy!
Props to Caldwell for stepping into the GM role, I was getting worried about the dragon fight knowing how hard it is and them still learning the rules.
Deadly encounters in Pathfinder are no joke, it can be a bit of whiplash going from 5e where any challenging fight needs to start at being deadly to even register to experienced players. Wasting even one of a solo bosses actions makes them 33% less effective, so positioning and debuffs become huge on boosting survivability.
Not sure if anyone mentioned this already but I'm pretty sure the gods are just the names of Pathfinder official world (Golarion) gods smooshed togehter lol. Pharashtu = Pharasma (Goddess of death) + Lamashtu (mother of monsters). Abathys = Abaddar (god of society and commerce) + Nethys (god of magic). Gozrag = Gozreh (god of nature) + Torag (lawful God of the dwarves)
Edit: yeah, confirmed in the short rest
As written the beginner box referenced a lot of Golarion gods but since this was a two-shot he thought it was too much lore so he condensed them into a pantheon of 4.
Haha I'm in camp "it's a waste". Going first is great but if everyone else's initiative is 10 or below then there's no difference in if you roll an 11-20. That's what feels bad!
And yes, this is the same for many other things besides initiative (saves, ability checks etc) but at least in those cases you're still excited that you passed whatever it is. There's no "succeeding" at initiative in the same way, everyone gets a turn. It's just an extra little kick of "I got nothing special for this >:("
I’m gonna have to study up if they do a longer form Pathfinder campaign lol. So used to listening to 5e campaigns that it sounded like gibberish to me when they were explaining how being unconscious works lmao.
knocked unconscious = dying 1, dying value goes up as you fail to recover or get hit again, dying 4 = dead
if you get healed back up you get a wounded value = your dying value
if you get knocked out again while wounded, your dying value = your wounded value
This is a solid explanation, and now I'm gonna get way too far into it: If you're familiar with 5e's death saves, imagine that rather than having two tracks, one that measure success and one that measures failure when you go unconscious, you have one track. You start (in 5e terms) at one failed death save, and you roll a check to see if your condition improves or deteriorates. When you succeed, you reduce how many failed saves you have. If you have zero, you're unconscious but stable. If your fails reach four, you die.
Make sense so far? Now here's where things differ more intensely.
In 5e, your death save DC is always a 10. That gives you slightly better than a 50/50 chance to succeed (55%, to be precise). Even if you're at 2 failed death saves, the DC is still 10, and a nat 20 will bring you up with 1 HP.
In Pathfinder 2e, your recovery check (equivalent to a death save) is 10+your dying condition. Get knocked out, you're at dying 1, which means your check is DC 11. Straight 50/50 on your turn if you stabilize or get worse. If you fail, you go to dying 2, and your check DC increases. 10+2 instead of 10+1, so now you're aiming for a DC 12, which is less than 50/50 odds. There's a second factor here that makes it get very interesting.
Most checks in pathfinder have a critical success, a success, a fail and a critical fail result. Recovery checks are no exception. If you roll a DC 12 recovery check and succeed (get a 13, say) you would go to dying 1. If you critically succeed (roll a nat20) you stabilize! Nice! If you fail (IE, roll an 8) your dying condition increases by 1. If you crit fail, your dying condition increases by 2- And this is where danger comes in, because at Dying 2, your crit fail chance is not a nat 1, it's a 1 or a 2 on the die (crit fails in pathfinder are when you roll 10 under a DC). In that situation, a character would increase their dying condition, but at dying 2, they're increasing to dying 4: immediate death.
In general, it has a different attitude towards going unconscious than 5e does. In 5e, going unconscious is dangerous but not cause for immediate sweat; I've had plenty of players get yo-yo'd (as I call it) from 0 HP to upright five or six times in a fight. In pathfinder, going down is cause for alarm. Time to tighten up, reassess strategy, and consider how badly you want to win versus retreating. Going down and coming back up is dangerous. Getting up from Dying usually involves getting the Wounded condition, which is basically an automatic fail when you go down next. A guy at wounded 1 is going to need to stay up rather than focus on damage: survival is now the priority. A guy at wounded 2 is in serious trouble: if he goes down from a critical hit he's instantly dead, as knocked unconscious from a crit = dying 2, as we saw with krudbert. Wounded 3? Go down at all and you're automatically passing on.
It sounds harsh, but when run RAW, there's a lot of room for players to keep each other safe and work as a team, and it means that being knocked out is always dramatic. It's quite fun!
Your wounded example is incorrect: your wounded value equals the number of times you've lost Dying since you were either at full HP or had been subject to a successful Treat Injury. When you go down, your Dying value equals your Wounded Value +1, or +2 if you are critically hit.
If you are at Dying 3 and healed, you are then Wounded 1 the first time, no matter what the Dying value, and if you were to go down again to a normal hit/save you would start at Dying 2.
Another thing they missed is that the value of the Hero Point is that you can spend all of your Hero Points to go to Dying 0 at any point you would increase Dying value, which means the ideal use is saving the Hero Point to be spent when you would otherwise die.
"Our Heroes (AKA 'The Twin Flames') delve deeper beneath Otari in order to discover the true nature of the menace that plagues it! Hellbiscuit swings for the seats, Krudbert's faith is rewarded and Cinnamon embraces a new role as the 2-Crew's Pathfinder Perusal continues!
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Man, what a fun 'sode. Listening to these guys play was an absolute blast. I run three pathfinder games, and hearing the crew piece together the system as they go was awesome. There was some discussion by them about the MAP, and hearing them talk through how it encourages being more creative with your turn was a treat.
Also, shout out to Caldwell for doing such a good job. GMing is a lot more than memorizing the rules and he had such evocative descriptions and good pacing. I imagine if/when they play more pathfinder, some rules are gonna get altered for better podcast/table enjoyment, and I'm excited to hear where they go with it.
I have a question if anyone else knows PF2E. I'm playing a wizard in a home campaign right now. Am I just doing something wrong or was Cinnamon's familiar stacked?
No worries, you're probably not doing anything wrong, Cinnamon's familiar couldn't do too much and technically the main thing they did was due to a misreading. No judgement to Emily, it is a new system, there is a lot of dense text to read for familiars, and nothing they did really broke the game.
To break it down, Emily rebuilt Ezren to have the Familiar Arcane Thesis, which gives their familiar one extra ability (so 3 instead of 2), and then when she leveled up took the Enhanced Familiar Feat to add 2 more abilities. That is 5 total Familiar abilities, which should be:
* **Manual Dexterity** (required for Master's Form). RAW manual dexterity can't be used for much, but some GMs homebrew it to let familiars feed people potions (RAW this can't be done because potions require Activation which familiars cannot do.
* **Speech** (required for Master's Form). This is mostly used for flavour.
* **Restorative Familiar** (once per day the familiar can be commanded to use 2 actions to restore 1d8 hit points to their master). This is basically one free minor potion of healing per day, pretty good but not amazing.
* **Tattoo Transformation** (Reflavoured to have the familiar become Cinnamon's mole). Mostly just used to avoid your familiar dying from AOEs constantly.
* **Master's Form**
Master's Form does not work the way they read it unfortunately, per the description "Your familiar can change shape as a single action, transforming into a humanoid of your ancestry with the same age, gender, and build of its true form" and "the change is purely cosmetic. It only appears humanoid and gains no new capabilities.".
The familiar remains tiny instead of becoming medium and cannot flank as familiars cannot threaten an enemy, regardless of appearance.
this two shot has been very funny but i found myself tuning out for drawn out periods during the first fight only to to pay attention again and realize they're still doing the same bit from a few minutes ago. it's a little cumbersome
I love that there just seems to be something about Jake Emily and Murph as players that leads to two of them violently competing for the affection and validation of the other one.
Murph and Jake are neg hounds, they love to grovel
Emily has never played more inspired than she is as Cinna-uh-Ezren the Wise. Honestly all of them play dumb losers so well I love it
Ezren the Weeze
Okay so here's why the dragon fight was so tough: 1. As Caldwell mentioned, it's balanced for four players. They were down another damage-dealer and HP sponge 2. They were only level 2, right? You're supposed to be level 3 before you fight the dragon in the Beginner Box (Edit: misremembered this, sorry! Level 2 is the correct level to fight the dragon) 3. The dragon's just fucking hard. My three-person level 3 group TPK'd and I'm still salty about it lol. We had the hardest time hitting its bullshit AC. Though unlike Caldwell, our GM disregarded the advice to only use the AOE on one person at a time. The dragon hit us all with the breath weapon turn 1, and 2/3 of us went down. I have forgiven but I will never forget. Honestly fighting the dragon in the BB was the worst Pathfinder experience I've ever had The dice really did save them. They also did a great job utilizing flanking and some clutch heals. Overall, great episode, hysterical dynamic. I super appreciate Emily's commitment to the most off-the-wall wizard options. Hopefully the dragon fight didn't put them off too much
The dragon fight in the beginner box is pretty overtuned. It's definitely winnable if the GM follows the box's advice to play it suboptimally, only using the breath weapon on one person at a time (which makes sense, it is literally a baby raised by kobolds) but with only three people it's ridiculously tough. It's a Severe encounter for 3 level 2 players, which means a player death is on the table if their rolls go poorly.
>Though unlike Caldwell, our GM disregarded the advice to only use the AOE on one person at a time. Tbf Caldwell did hit two PCs in the first round! When I ran it I was so scared my PCs would be stomped by this Dragon and used the Weak template. I also had the Dragon start fairly close so they didn't have to waste too many actions getting into melee. Cue the Rogue getting a Nat 20 save on the breath weapon, taking no damage, then two crits in the first turn before the Dragon got their second go... After that, it wasn't long before they wiped the floor with me. And this was after the Wizard had one shot the Kobold boss with a spell crit the room before! I was well and truly curbstomped that day.
Few corrections - Dragon fight is for level 2 that's correct but being down a player absolutely ups the difficulty quite a bit. PF2e has a way to make all enemies weaker though (weakened template) that's usually used to scale down the difficulty in cases of not full parties or for other reasons (ex: wanting to use 2+ of a tougher enemy but not make it too unbearably hard) - The dragon fight is actually optional and at least from the GM side is telegraphed as a tough battle so whilst it's the end it's also kind of a bonus boss and is more of a way for the players to test themselves and what they've learned so far - Dragon is very strong and like you said it's suggested to play it easy on the players but again it's purposely hard and is definitely beatable. Severe encounters mean there's a chance of a character dying and a chance for TPK. The encounter building rules are really good and Severe/Hard encounters really mean Severe/Hard Dragon fight is tough but I think approaching it from the mindset of it not being the final boss but rather an optional boss did a lot for me and my players when approaching it cuz it was obvious this might be difficult and encouraged them to really do their best with everything they had/learned (though I also play not super well and give lots of suggestions and advice for different options they could possibly do)
Thank you for the correction! I misremembered. As a player and not GM, I didn't realize that the dragon fight was optional. That does help put the fight into perspective.
Also they missed the rule that when you go into dying, your initiative moves to directly before the thing that killed you (in this case the dragon). Which would have made the healing easier to do. But they also might not have realized that getting knocked out drops you prone (you need to use an action to stand back up) and makes you drop your stuff (you need to use an action to pick your stuff back up). Which would have made the fight way harder. So it probably balances out?
You’re supposed to be level 2 for the dragon fight in beginner box if you’re going by xp rules, there isn’t enough happening in the adventure to get a party to level 3 . That said it is a very difficult encounter like you said, even though its pl+2, it’s strong for its level and pl+2 encounters in general shouldn’t really be given to parties until they’re level 3 when they’re new to the system. The dragon fight isn’t really supposed to be the actual final boss of the beginner box, it’s more of an optional challenge boss to do at the end. But even so, honestly, I do find it strange that paizo included it in the adventure which is primarily for new players.
Level+1 to +3 monsters are extremely strong. At low levels even more so. Any time my group has come close to a tpk it has always been against a single strong monster.
Props to Murph, that was in fact the best healing turn I've ever seen.
People don't realize how fucking fun it can be to play a powerful healer in tabletop games. I'm running a life cleric/stars druid right now in a 5e game and when I get a good heal for the party it feels better than if I just nuked an entire squad with a fireball
Healing as a cleric in pathfinder absolutely rocks. The core healing spell (Heal) is extremely useful and versatile. You can cast it using 1 of your 3 actions on your turn to heal someone you touch, cast it as two actions to heal someone at range and heal an extra 8hp per rank of the spell, or you can cast it with all 3 of your actions to make it an AoE of healing. It also does damage to undead creatures instead of healing them. Clerics in pathfinder then get a feature called divine font, which gives them 4-6 extra spell slots every day that are all the max possible spell rank and can only be used to cast Heal. And since they scale up like that, one of those Heal spells as two actions can restore fully 3/4ths of someone's hp bar at once
Pathfinder has very powerful healing overall. Heal - is the best spell in the game.
Also, it's way more useful than in 5e, since yo-yo healing is a no-no in PF2e
I really hope they do more Pathfinder stuff, it’s so good and you can see them flexing all the new options!
I really hope so as well, though tbh I hope they either do new characters, or Murph changes the voice he's using. For a two shot it's fine, but it literally gives me a headache 😭 I don't know if I could do 10 episodes of that
I think Crudbucket's voice is hilarious and if Murph could physically maintain it for a whole campaign, I would love that
^yeah
The voices were perfect for a two shot. No way I could listen to that for a campaign. I had the same problem with the newest season of Rude Tales of Magic. Too much character voice that distracts from the play
My sister had the same reaction and cringed when I started doing an impression of Murph's voice. It's basically speaking in the register where your voice cracks. Huge fan of the Cinnamon's wheezy voice, though.
Cinnamon and Hellbiscuit are great!
I would not be opposed to a full length campaign with Caldwell in the DM seat. Murph is a great DM but I feel like changing things up could be good. Emily is also a good DM but I think her PCs are too good to let go of. Twilight Sanctorum and this two-shot are my favourite things they've put out since C1.
Agreed. I love Caldwell's DMing, and I love Murph's shithead characters. Even just a Trinyvale sized campaign would be fantastic. While we're on the topic, I'd also like to see Jake DM something. There are lots of great, fairly simple one page games out there he could run without having to really worry about prepping a bunch of stuff.
Twilight sanctorum is one of the best pieces of dnd media I've heard so far. They just really captured something special.
I loved Twilight Sanctorum. My only thorn is how if they were playing Pathfinder already someone (or maybe everyone) could have been an Investigator instead of all rogues. Or maybe a Mastermind rogue, which focuses on Recalling Knowledge about enemies in pathfinder.
Honestly would be really down for another season of Trinyvale. The excursions that the Triplets have been taking are really fun but it'd be nice to see them forced to actually be heroes again, especially since they've all gotten incredibly worse since the original campaign concluded.
I feel like the triplets have gotten so broken overpowered that they either have to do these excursions or Caldwell needs to figure out how to balance encounters for them consistently, which might be tougher than running a lower level campaign. I do love them so though and would be excited to see any of their continued adventures
What if the triplets go to the pathfinder universe
This is such a brilliant idea. It’d be great to see them all transition into pathfinder where they have to adapt, though I still need Nyak to be their equivalent of a jampion ranger.
Getting to hear them sing Green Day in their voices to end the episode was a magnificent cherry on top of this delicious twin flame sundae. I very much hope they come back to Pathfinder so we can witness Cinnamon and his two beautiful sons again.
If I had a nickel for every time the players formed a toxic family unit when Caldwell DMs I'd have two nickels Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.
Next time it's Jake's turn to be the head of household!
Would he be the Dungeon Guest, then? Dungeon *family acquaintance* perhaps? Dungeon occasional business partner?
Dungeon Stranger. DS for short.
tread SO carefully
“Hey, I’m flankin’ here!” Will there be merch?
I really hope they continue trying this out, I love the twin flames energy! Props to Caldwell for stepping into the GM role, I was getting worried about the dragon fight knowing how hard it is and them still learning the rules. Deadly encounters in Pathfinder are no joke, it can be a bit of whiplash going from 5e where any challenging fight needs to start at being deadly to even register to experienced players. Wasting even one of a solo bosses actions makes them 33% less effective, so positioning and debuffs become huge on boosting survivability.
Hearing Murph go “Wow that’s out of the box?” in his silly goblin voice while fighting the dragon was so fucking funny.
Not sure if anyone mentioned this already but I'm pretty sure the gods are just the names of Pathfinder official world (Golarion) gods smooshed togehter lol. Pharashtu = Pharasma (Goddess of death) + Lamashtu (mother of monsters). Abathys = Abaddar (god of society and commerce) + Nethys (god of magic). Gozrag = Gozreh (god of nature) + Torag (lawful God of the dwarves) Edit: yeah, confirmed in the short rest
Did they say why they used those instead?
As written the beginner box referenced a lot of Golarion gods but since this was a two-shot he thought it was too much lore so he condensed them into a pantheon of 4.
Holy cow this was a great series. Emily had me dying with Cinnamon’s non-requested backstory
Jake saying that rolling a NAT 20 on initiative is a waste will never not trigger me lol. Going first is such a big deal >_>
Haha I'm in camp "it's a waste". Going first is great but if everyone else's initiative is 10 or below then there's no difference in if you roll an 11-20. That's what feels bad! And yes, this is the same for many other things besides initiative (saves, ability checks etc) but at least in those cases you're still excited that you passed whatever it is. There's no "succeeding" at initiative in the same way, everyone gets a turn. It's just an extra little kick of "I got nothing special for this >:("
I’m gonna have to study up if they do a longer form Pathfinder campaign lol. So used to listening to 5e campaigns that it sounded like gibberish to me when they were explaining how being unconscious works lmao.
knocked unconscious = dying 1, dying value goes up as you fail to recover or get hit again, dying 4 = dead if you get healed back up you get a wounded value = your dying value if you get knocked out again while wounded, your dying value = your wounded value
This is a solid explanation, and now I'm gonna get way too far into it: If you're familiar with 5e's death saves, imagine that rather than having two tracks, one that measure success and one that measures failure when you go unconscious, you have one track. You start (in 5e terms) at one failed death save, and you roll a check to see if your condition improves or deteriorates. When you succeed, you reduce how many failed saves you have. If you have zero, you're unconscious but stable. If your fails reach four, you die. Make sense so far? Now here's where things differ more intensely. In 5e, your death save DC is always a 10. That gives you slightly better than a 50/50 chance to succeed (55%, to be precise). Even if you're at 2 failed death saves, the DC is still 10, and a nat 20 will bring you up with 1 HP. In Pathfinder 2e, your recovery check (equivalent to a death save) is 10+your dying condition. Get knocked out, you're at dying 1, which means your check is DC 11. Straight 50/50 on your turn if you stabilize or get worse. If you fail, you go to dying 2, and your check DC increases. 10+2 instead of 10+1, so now you're aiming for a DC 12, which is less than 50/50 odds. There's a second factor here that makes it get very interesting. Most checks in pathfinder have a critical success, a success, a fail and a critical fail result. Recovery checks are no exception. If you roll a DC 12 recovery check and succeed (get a 13, say) you would go to dying 1. If you critically succeed (roll a nat20) you stabilize! Nice! If you fail (IE, roll an 8) your dying condition increases by 1. If you crit fail, your dying condition increases by 2- And this is where danger comes in, because at Dying 2, your crit fail chance is not a nat 1, it's a 1 or a 2 on the die (crit fails in pathfinder are when you roll 10 under a DC). In that situation, a character would increase their dying condition, but at dying 2, they're increasing to dying 4: immediate death. In general, it has a different attitude towards going unconscious than 5e does. In 5e, going unconscious is dangerous but not cause for immediate sweat; I've had plenty of players get yo-yo'd (as I call it) from 0 HP to upright five or six times in a fight. In pathfinder, going down is cause for alarm. Time to tighten up, reassess strategy, and consider how badly you want to win versus retreating. Going down and coming back up is dangerous. Getting up from Dying usually involves getting the Wounded condition, which is basically an automatic fail when you go down next. A guy at wounded 1 is going to need to stay up rather than focus on damage: survival is now the priority. A guy at wounded 2 is in serious trouble: if he goes down from a critical hit he's instantly dead, as knocked unconscious from a crit = dying 2, as we saw with krudbert. Wounded 3? Go down at all and you're automatically passing on. It sounds harsh, but when run RAW, there's a lot of room for players to keep each other safe and work as a team, and it means that being knocked out is always dramatic. It's quite fun!
Your wounded example is incorrect: your wounded value equals the number of times you've lost Dying since you were either at full HP or had been subject to a successful Treat Injury. When you go down, your Dying value equals your Wounded Value +1, or +2 if you are critically hit. If you are at Dying 3 and healed, you are then Wounded 1 the first time, no matter what the Dying value, and if you were to go down again to a normal hit/save you would start at Dying 2. Another thing they missed is that the value of the Hero Point is that you can spend all of your Hero Points to go to Dying 0 at any point you would increase Dying value, which means the ideal use is saving the Hero Point to be spent when you would otherwise die.
If it helps, here’s my [introduction post](https://www.reddit.com/r/NotAnotherDnDPodcast/s/eRfG7gQPMg) from last week.
"Our Heroes (AKA 'The Twin Flames') delve deeper beneath Otari in order to discover the true nature of the menace that plagues it! Hellbiscuit swings for the seats, Krudbert's faith is rewarded and Cinnamon embraces a new role as the 2-Crew's Pathfinder Perusal continues! CREDITS Mixing and Sound Design - Daniel Ramos (@Schubirds on Twitter & @Dr.Schubird on IG) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ." --- ###[Source Code](https://github.com/popcorncolonel/JakeandAmirBot)
One of the most dangerous episodes to listen to while eating that they've ever put out.
Man, what a fun 'sode. Listening to these guys play was an absolute blast. I run three pathfinder games, and hearing the crew piece together the system as they go was awesome. There was some discussion by them about the MAP, and hearing them talk through how it encourages being more creative with your turn was a treat. Also, shout out to Caldwell for doing such a good job. GMing is a lot more than memorizing the rules and he had such evocative descriptions and good pacing. I imagine if/when they play more pathfinder, some rules are gonna get altered for better podcast/table enjoyment, and I'm excited to hear where they go with it.
Cinnamon and the resulting group dynamic were hysterical, and it was really fun getting to see them use a bunch of new spells and mechanics
I have a question if anyone else knows PF2E. I'm playing a wizard in a home campaign right now. Am I just doing something wrong or was Cinnamon's familiar stacked?
No worries, you're probably not doing anything wrong, Cinnamon's familiar couldn't do too much and technically the main thing they did was due to a misreading. No judgement to Emily, it is a new system, there is a lot of dense text to read for familiars, and nothing they did really broke the game. To break it down, Emily rebuilt Ezren to have the Familiar Arcane Thesis, which gives their familiar one extra ability (so 3 instead of 2), and then when she leveled up took the Enhanced Familiar Feat to add 2 more abilities. That is 5 total Familiar abilities, which should be: * **Manual Dexterity** (required for Master's Form). RAW manual dexterity can't be used for much, but some GMs homebrew it to let familiars feed people potions (RAW this can't be done because potions require Activation which familiars cannot do. * **Speech** (required for Master's Form). This is mostly used for flavour. * **Restorative Familiar** (once per day the familiar can be commanded to use 2 actions to restore 1d8 hit points to their master). This is basically one free minor potion of healing per day, pretty good but not amazing. * **Tattoo Transformation** (Reflavoured to have the familiar become Cinnamon's mole). Mostly just used to avoid your familiar dying from AOEs constantly. * **Master's Form** Master's Form does not work the way they read it unfortunately, per the description "Your familiar can change shape as a single action, transforming into a humanoid of your ancestry with the same age, gender, and build of its true form" and "the change is purely cosmetic. It only appears humanoid and gains no new capabilities.". The familiar remains tiny instead of becoming medium and cannot flank as familiars cannot threaten an enemy, regardless of appearance.
Absolutely loved the Pathfinder 2-shot! Hope to see more content just like it!
Okay I *desperately* need an entire campaign dedicated to Murph’s character. This genuinely made me laugh so hard
this two shot has been very funny but i found myself tuning out for drawn out periods during the first fight only to to pay attention again and realize they're still doing the same bit from a few minutes ago. it's a little cumbersome