this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Pathfinder 2e General Discussion
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Yeah the plan is to start at level 1 again as the current campaign will come to an end this or next week (depends on if they die to the bbeg or not)
I am planning to run a completely home brew setting again as I didn’t like running a predefined adventure too much. I’ve created a setting in 5e before wich worked really well.
The setting originally was planned for 5e so I’m just gonna port it over. There was a mechanic planned that heavily used the exhaustion mechanic as a kind of stand in for a really bad disease. The pf2e exhaustion does not seem to have levels like that where it gets progressively worse. How would you create such a mechanic. The idea is that you’ll go from healthy to dead in roughly 20 days, originally I was thinking on giving disadvantage and exhaustion levels at certain points (don’t worry I’m not planning to take pcs out of the action for too long). But I have no idea if that would be too harsh in pathfinder or not. Could someone with more experience weigh in?
The immediately obvious way to make such a disease is to make it an actual disease using the affliction rules. This however would get easier to deal with as your characters level up, since the DC will stay constant but the PCs saves will go up. Another way to go about it would be to have a lost of conditions, which accumulate for each day/week. So on the first day/week you gain Clumsy 1, then also Enfeebled 1, then also Clumsy 2 and so forth. This will very quickly become VERY punishing though, unless you carefully pick conditions that don't affect your PCs very much. The entire list of conditions can be found here. I would probably use Fatigued and Flat-footed for the first few levels and then the ones listed under Lowered abilities after that, maybe even throwing in a Doomed or two along the way. But as I said, this can very quickly become VERY punishing.
Just as a heads up. The pre-written adventures for pf2e are so much better than anything official for DnD 5e it's not even funny.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't run homebrew. Just a heads up to maybe look at some APs.
Pf2e actually does have a dedicated disease mechanic, which is essentially to structure the affliction as a set of stages with defined lengths. At the end of each stage's length, you make a new save against it, and reduce the stage by 1 if you succeed or increase it by 1 if you fail (2 if you critically fail). Here's the existing diseases you could copy from, including for example malaria). In most cases pf2e's DCs are scaled to the level of a creature or effect, meaning that a level 1 character has about the same chance of beating a level 1 DC as a level 10 character has at beating a level 10 DC. What that means though is that +1 and -1 bonuses are pretty strong, and inflicting the kinds of penalties 5e's exhaustion has would probably quickly lead to a TPK. Hope that helps!