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.
No problem!
The system itself will definitely encourage that kind of behaviour. The encounter math and creature balancing rules say that if a creature has some specific weakness, then it can have much higher HP and defenses, so you get these encounters where by-the-numbers they are fair, but if the players never figure out the gimmick, the fight will be pretty unfair and probably hit them like a truck. Just be sure to ease off a bit the first time. And then when they come back to that fight later you can take the gloves off because they should know better what they are getting into.
For monsters I would say just use the basic system of the recall knowledge action, but be generous with when players can use it and how much info they get on a success. It’s actually pretty fun and realistic for players to get their asses handed to them, find out how to kill a thing, and then go back prepared. One thing I’ll do as well is encourage them to recall knowledge on something they’ve seen even if they are not actively looking at it, since that encourages downtime investigate activities.
Oh ok! We have all played 5e for years now so we never remember recall knowledge in combat. As a matter of fact I think I may have forgotten to mention it at all throughout the beginner box so I should certainly do that for the next session. Getting your ass kicked and then coming back and stacking bodies after learning some new vital info about the enemy sounds like a really satisfying gameplay loop and I hope I’m able to emulate that in our campaign.
Yeah it lends a real Dark Souls kind of flavour to things where in addition to characters levelling up, the players actually feel like they are getting better simply by virtue of slowly learning more about the system.
When I ran the beginner box, the room where Recall Knowledge ended up coming out was when the players nearly got TPKd by the fire rat. At that point I was like, “you know, you guys can learn about creature’s weaknesses with this one-action ability that anyone can do”
It’s funny you should mention that rat! Lmao in our last session they fought that cinder rat and were getting absolutely stomped by it while rolling garbage on their flat checks. It downed two PCs and set them all on fire before they managed to kill it. And I made them all rage quit at the end of the session when I thanked them all for letting me “smoke their asses.”
I would definitely use that as a teachable moment for your group. If players feel like encounters are just sometimes bullshit, they won’t have a good impression of PF2e. But instead if you do a bit of a postmortem on the rat fight, you can help them understand that one of the great things about this system is that some encounters are less of a slugfest and more of a puzzle to solve using the combat mechanics of the game.
The whole point of the BB is to introduce players to the system, so don’t be afraid to stop things and explain what lesson should be learned.
Yeah we certainly need to go over recall knowledge at a minimum. But the Rat fight was more so a comedy of errors than anything else. They did eventually start splashing the rat with water and using cold damage so they definitely learned something from the encounter lol Despite the confusion with the new ruleset my players are enjoying the BB. Even the player who cares least for PF2e is enjoying it and is eyeing a kineticist for AV. His biggest hangup is the vancian magic style for prepared casters though.
Yeah the way prepared casters work can be a bit more complex than in 5e. Casters do have to get comfortable with being just a bit worse at everything, but it’s only because the designers of 5e have allowed for so much power creep that casters have no limits at all. I was talking to a buddy in my group about this but if you think about it, there’s literally nothing a fighter can do better than a wizard in 5e. If a wizard builds for it, they can be better at killing things than a fighter. In PF2e, the delineation between martial and caster is much stronger. There are things a caster can do that a martial can’t, but there are also things a martial can do that a caster can’t. And casters take a bit longer to become that powerful.
You bring up excellent points! I will have to talk to my buddy who is the most outspoken Pathfinder critic about this. One of his favorite builds is a bladesinger wizard so the argument you raise will have a little extra heft when I use it against him lol
Yeah the bladesinger embodies a lot of what I hate the most about 5e. But you could point your friend to the Magus. It’s a fun class but it’s more analogous to the 5e Eldritch Knight than the bladesinger or hexblade. 75% martial and 25% caster.