Not gonna lie, it was kinda cathartic for Troy to just come out and say the encounter sucks. Maybe not this encounter in general but the one being presented in this episode was a slog.
As well written as Paizo APs are generally (this one not as much), they all contain a lot of "who fucking cares?" encounters, because they're designed for XP leveling (not milestone). I'm glad Troy did that with this encounter (he should have done it more), and I sincerely hope he continues to do so in whatever they do next, if it's another 2e AP. Trim the fat, focus on the encounters that actually matter.
@@ShoobieDoobieDoo Paizo often puts more encounters than are needed for a normal party to level up. Completionist parties tend to get levels earlier than others that skip more encounters. AP's are designed to have minimal homebrew to work, but all GMs should adapt them to their tables and playstyle. I love to change loot and switch up monsters that are harder/easier for my party to defeat. I also like adding more environmental elements to spice up the combat and give PCs more options. Constructs and Incorporeals are the creatures you need to take a second look at, because some parties might struggle more than they should need to. These are creatures that are often fairly stronger for their level.
@@lesrek3938 That's not strictly true. "Seven Dooms for Sandpoint" and "Season of Ghosts," at the very least, still used XP. And they came out after SKT.
This cabinet is a distillation of everything that was wrong with Gatewalkers. Meaningless encounters that just happen to be high threat simply to show off some monster from the backmatter. If it was the only thing like that, no one would mind. A single boring exhausting encounter isn't the end of the world. Unfortunately, the whole AP is littered with them and it builds increasing frustration. Nice to see Troy finally not only recognize that but also let everyone vent a bit. I have high hopes for GCP C3 with the lessons learned from all of this.
I've not played any Pathfinder (my only knowledge of it is watching the GCN play through the APs), but I've watched this one more for the players than the narrative because the story, at least as it's played out so far, has been trash. And the vast majority of that feeling has been due to these random, high-intensity-for-no-reason encounters.
The thing is, Troy should be changing these encounters. I can’t understand why he seems unwilling to put in the work to adjust this AP to make it work better for THEIR FLAGSHIP SHOW
Honestly I couldn’t imagine running any of the APs without cutting 2/3rds of the encounters. They are just too combat heavy unless your group just loves combat.
BEST EPISODE OF CAMPAIGN 2 EVER! Thank you Troy and players for the cathartic release of so many frustrations we have felt as GMs and players with some of these encounters and rules.
I really appreciated this episode. I don't actually know the GCN crew - I'm just a schlub that listens to a lot of their stuff. That doesn't make you know somebody. So I kinda needed to know that 1) Everybody was cool with Sidney and 2) Sidney was still having a good time. Unironic respect, I'm still trying to be that chill. And while I don't know the GCN crew, I do see tired eyes every day in the mirror, and I saw them here too. I don't know you Troy, but thanks for your honesty this episode. I felt the authenticity in this episode that made me stoked for the GCN in the first place.
My new years resolution this year is to finish painting 1 miniature a day and i can build up a buffer. So far ive finished 35 minis so even if i dont last the entire year it has cleared a lot of minis of my painting station. Im gaming the system finishing of all the 75% done projects feeling real clever
My group noped right out of that cabinet fight. First hit, fighter is poisoned. Then slaps his forehead remembering he has an antidote potion In his pack. They all left and shut the door. Walked back to Deniigi. The fighter hands her the potion. "Here. I'm poisoned. It's fine."
A Pathfinder AdventurePath Designer had a really bad experiencing helping a friend move house once. Then they decided to show the world the horror of furniture.
Wow, you can tell how good it felt for Troy to get that off his chest. It seemed like everyone's mood improved once the combat was simply waved. I'm not sure what the players could have done differently as I'm not experienced with PF2e, but it felt like a rough combat (well, aside from get a lucky critical hit).
Calling the fight was a good idea. If you imagine the room as a place of, potentially explosive, alchemical experiments, it kind of makes sense that the cabinet has so much hardness. All the dangerous stuff would be stored inside it, so it wouldn't break from the experiments. Maybe :)
The last couple of episodes really shine the light on the vitriol the cast has for campaign. I really hope they find one they all enjoy or one that Troy builds from scratch that everyone can get into. I love the makeup of this cast but, like them, it's been tough trying to get into the meat and potatoes of this campaign. Still enjoy every episode but I'm betting it's because I just enjoy listening to the GCP banter and goof.
The amount of comments i see about how Troy just needs to take the time to write a new better AP in place of Gatewalkers and its his fault this AP is garbage is driving me crazy. If Troy wanted to spend hours making an encounter, I hope he homebrews something instead of trying to fix this AP. I’ve been playing tabletop since 3.5 D&D, almost two decades now and Gatewalkers is one of the worst AP’s ive seen or watched. Telling troy to just fix it is insane, it would legitimately be easier to just make something good from scratch. Also the catharsis from Troy ragging on the AP, god bless
Winter and exercise (mentioned in banter) : I bought a relatively cheap treadmill and I walk 30 minutes/day, watching the GCN ! Best thing I ever bought. Lack of exercise can kill you is what I learnt from nearly two years of COVID19 isolation (i.e. cholesterol accumulated to fatal levels due to lack of mobility and there is a big genetic factor also).
Isn't it great how the body starts dying the moment it's not being used hardcore in day to day life? Things are good and food is plentiful? Time to stack the cholesterol in the arteries!
it does feel like Troy and the team have a weight lifted off of them. Of late, one or another might frustratingly ask "what are we even doing here?" when dealing with one of these high-level single-enemy deadly encounters, but in this episode they're laughing together about it
Joe was right about the "Live Wire" spell after the nerf. In PC2, Live Wire is heighten +1, add 1d4 electricity and 1d4 slashing. The nerf changes it to heighten +2.
Before everyone gets too excited and grabs the Live Wire spell, errata came out for it in December too late for this episode. 'Page 248: Live wire’s damage increases far too quickly due to a typo. Change “Heightened (+1)” to “Heightened (+2)“.'
Something tells me the events of this episode was the final straw for the decision to bring Gatewalkers to an early finish. I've never seen Troy get frustrated in-game as a GM until this episode. I'm ride or die if GCW continued on, but I understand why they're not, especially after this. Hope that whatever comes next won't be long in the making and that it will go better.
Without fudging the cabinet's HP this was the best way to handle it. Sometimes encounters are more like puzzles. This encounter should have been written as a series of skillchecks rather than yet another enemy grind. Especially on a team that has few ways of buffing attack rolls/reducing AC. Courageous Anthem would come in real handy here, could have turned a few 10=0 damage rolls into real damage. But sometimes encounters are solved and you're just going through the motions, better to just shrug with a "yeah yeah yeah describe your kill and let's move on."
It doesn't help that Gatewalkers is really just a poorly written AP that has a ton of random encounters like this one that don't add anything of interest to the actual story.
This is a moderate encounter. It's meant to be challenging to a party of four. Not to mention that a critical hit or reducing the creature to half HP removes is armor, which reduces its AC from 24 to 20. Troy could've easily queued the players towards an alternative mechanic to interact with this, because this party is not geared towards this type of encounters. While a Party with a Barbarian or a Magus would make short work of it. If I were Troy, I would've lowered the hardness to 5. That would've been much easier for this party's composition.
Troy’s made it clear he doesn’t want to scale down encounters they’re meant for 4 when he has 5 players. I think Troy just needs to remove at least 1/3 encounters from whatever they run next if it is still PF2e. The APs are stuff too combat heavy. After listening to Find the Path and hearing they remove a lot of encounters it really improves the APs at least for podcasts.
I was waiting for the episode and I knew pretty early on it was gonna be this one. I'm a gcp fan for life and I'd listen to yall talk about paint drying, but it will be cool to start a story that everyone can get into.
I've read from others this is the last recorded episode before they announced the end of their Gatewalkers campaign... It could be it. Something about Troy doing something he's never done before. I'm so excited ! I love the crew and the shows, but I also love the table drama, because it makes their game feel so real.
With the scent memory thing, I have a weird association of this cheap men's summer cologne called Nautical with the movie Ghostbusters. I saw it for the first time and it was also the first time I used the cologne. Kept the bottle just so I can get a whiff of Ghostbusters whenever I want.
I think construct armour is a bit broken at early levels. In the Starfinder 2E playtest I ran there was a statue with construct armour at level 1. It was a massive slog for the party who's only "mistake" was being unable to roll a nat 20 to break the armour. Thankfully in the reddit thread where I left the feedback a Paizo member responded.
This was such a hilarious episode to listen to. Skid’s joke at 13:54 is my favourite type of Skid humour. And all the npc meta commentary was hilarious 😂 The delivery in that last line by Troy absolute killed me!
50:27 You could have used your last action to Aid an ally on their attack. There is never a useless "third action." A Crit will reduce its AC, which would have trivialized the fight. The meta of the game is essentially about Crit fishing. Through buffs and debuffs, you have means to somewhat control the outcome in favor of a Crit and as a group (!), you want to work toward that. This is a team-oriented game. Don't just attack creature party level +2 without flanking. Don't cast a spell without prior debuffing with Bon Mot or Demoralize. The game is designed in a way that it assumes basic tactics (flanking) to even out the mathmatical advantage of enemies. The -2 AC due to Off-Guard is HUGE. Barnes could have flanked every time with his mirror to make things significantly easier. That would have turned your 13 on your roll to hit to an 11. So every time you encounter a single enemy, you have to set up a flank or be frustrated.
Where the hell has this buggles been the entire campaign. It'd be way more interesting if they had to contend with the Coolakahn for longer periods of time
I think the issue with this AP is that it doesn't feel very grounded. First edition APs had a grittiness to them that made them feel real even though the setting is fantastical. The stakes also don't feel very high and I'm still not sure what the plot is. 😅
Nah, Strange Aeons is incredibly high concept, and the crew is doing a great job with it. It's not the lack of grittiness hampering this AP, it's just that there's no clear reason for the PCs to keep throwing themselves at meaningless, deadly random encounters over and over and over. The AP design actively discourages the PCs from wanting to proceed.
The title would suggest to keep a lookout for a William Hurt or Marly Matlin reference =) However.. if it's Skid mentioning it... could be an obscure Piper Laurie ref... But Somehow in my mind Skid is saying Marly Matlin. LOL Ahoy Naish
Paul Winchell was the voice of the owl en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tootsie_Pop#:~:text=In%20the%20original%20television%20ad,(voiced%20by%20Paul%20Winchell).
Re: Joe's Live Wire confusion, Demiplane has a typo saying heightened (+2) whereas Player Core 2 & Archives of Nethys has heightened (+1). So if he's using Demiplane for the detail that would explain that!
I sympathize with Mathew, whenever I try to wake up earlier or stay up later so i can have time to freely do what I have to for myself, my family follows me... they will never be up before 9 am unless I'm up before 9 (and yes I am quite about it) for real 4:30 in the morning and the whole dam house is up like its noon 😮💨
I'm a Halston guy. The secret to any perfume or cologne is using less than you think you need. The idea is to supplement, not replace, what you naturally smell like.
Too bad there wasn’t a way for the bard to permanently charm the cabinet, so it could follow her around like a pet and she could store things in it… Akin to the trunk from Diskworld… and even casually ride in one of the drawers.
As someone playing Gateswalker, who hated this cabinet with all my heart.... Troy has all the ability in the world to fix this campaign, but if you just run straight through with the AP it's a slog. There's plenty of tools to balance the encounters, and the AP has been out long enough for there to be rather public fixes offered. And to be a bigger jerk, how Troy expects to make a game when he only runs directly from the book is.... I hope you guys stick with pathfinder.
Troy definitely need to run his own stuff and throw out the script. Aka, embrace his inner GM. Anyways, Paizo has seen a steady decline in their APs quality, everything they write now is un-iconic and asepticized.
Livewire increases damage every 2 spell ranks. The reason for this is that it increases bt 2d4 each increment instead of just 1d4 like most cantrips. So you have in essence a really bad cantrip damage rank every other rank, and a normal rank the rest. This is balanced due to the cantrip being able to not only hit two weaknesses, but theoretically applying weakness twice per one use if said target had weakness to both slashing and electricity damage. So Joe is 100% right here. Paizo should change the heightened dialog to say every rank a spell heightens instead of using +1, +2 etc. I know it's word count reasons but it causes a lot of confusion to the average person.
IIRC livewire recently got erratad to be heightened +2 from +1. AoN still has the old spell description of +1 so I’m guessing they were both correctly reading what was in front of them but the info Syd has was out of date and Joes wasn’t.
@@Zygoth80 Yea I just meant in general whatever they were each looking at be it the spell description online, a character sheet etc that Syds was out of date and Joes was updated with the current Errata. Im guessing they don’t use the same character builders nowadays since it’d be weird if they were displaying differently
Yes, it's not immune but resistant. Yes its made of wood, but go home and hold a flame to any wood in your home and it will not instantly combust. I have to explain this to my players alot too. Lol
Interesting that Troy is talking about how the encounter and the payoff suck at 1:44:00. Troy, you're the GM. You are in charge of designing and running the encounters and the encounter payoff. That's your responsibility. And if the AP (gatewalkers is notoriously bad) is written with poor encounters, then as a GM you need to adjust them. The players can complain about the encounters, but its a bit weird that the GM complains about the encounters as if he's just along for the ride? Troy, you're the one that's supposed to ensure the encounters and payoffs are worth playing - including changing the AP as written if need be!
The GM is a player too bro. If the AP sucks, it isn’t reasonable to ask the Gm to put in that much extra effort dude. How many hours of work do you expect Troy to put into this one encounter? This AP just sucks.
@Tecmaster96 troy chose this ap. As a pathfinder gm myself I know how much work it is to run an AP - that's the task you take on when you decide to gm an adventure. It's weird to complain about the encounter when you're the one who decided to run it in that manner. Ultimately, the responsibility for providing cool and meaningful encounters rests on the GMs shoulders.
@@gsfjohndoe bad take imo. If an AP is so bad you can’t run it without significantly rejiggering it, the value adddd over just homebrewing something yourself is significantly lost. After all, you pay money for an AP, and not to homebrew so one presumes the AP should be able to be run without significantly rejiggering it. But clearly not, and there’s always endless defenders saying GM’s should pay money for the privilege of homebrewing licensed content. Like fr, the idea that you’d pay money to correct someone else’s shoddy work is…. Comical. If you have to do the work yourself, skip the payment process and make it yourself. Or just type “make me a bad encounter in pathfinder 2e” into chatGPT, that’s also free compared to paying Paizo. Put it to you one way. I can change the oil in my car or I can take it to the shop. If I choose to pay to take it to the shop, and they do the oil change wrong, and I saw someone online saying any good mechanic would double check their mechanics work, for several hours, I’d laugh. That simply doesn’t make sense. I can just change the oil myself.
@Tecmaster96 if he didn't like the encounter he should have just skipped it. As a gm, that's also his call. Here it seems he's just following the ap without preparing and that's just lazy GMing, period. Ultimately, it's troys responsibility to provide cool encounters. He should cut the ones that aren't worth it, or improve them, his call. But to choose to run a shitty encounter and then complain that the encounter you chose to run sucks is simply bad GMing. To use your analogy: troy chose to buy a shitty car, refuses to either do work on it or pay to have work done on it by someone else, but insists on still driving it while complaining about how it sucks.
to be fair, I may be wrong but I thought I read that Troy chose this AP based on what was available when campaign 2 started, i.e. book 1 and an outline for the remaining books
Meh. Boo. If the encounter as written isn't working, you change it to make it work without telling the players that's what you are doing. Have a secondary group of NPCs show up to make the fight a three-way and change the dynamics (raiders, a bounty hunter, a monster hunter, or maybe a thief that needs the antidote and uses their distraction to steal it). Maybe give the monster a phase 2 that simultaneously makes it more of a threat, but lowers the DR, or give it a soft enrage, where they see it starts destroying the shop as it hops around angrily and there's a threat each round it remains alive that it is going to accidentally destroy the antidote, so they have to change their stand-off tactics and enter the building to finish it off. You certainly don't tell the players there's nothing of note in the apothecary shop so the whole thing is a waste of time, that you're bored of the fight and just declare they win. That's hugely boring. Also, they've rolled multiple Fan Fumbles in each fight and you just skipped any further likely fumbles. Troy read the encounter and knew this would happen going in by his own admission. Sometimes I don't understand Troy's thinking. He clearly modifies encounters, especially RP encounters, when he reads the room and plays off of the the crew as they ad lib, but with most fights he seemingly can't or won't improvise while simultaneously making clear he's not enjoying what is happening.
Troy doesn't seem that engaged with the AP or system these days. And considering how much he's leaning on just playing encounters straight, I doubt he's doing a lot of prep. That's less of a problem if the AP you're running is decent, and has a lot of varied encounters and options to pull from. But Gatewalkers is... Not a decent AP. It needs a lot of love, and Troy doesn't seem willing/able to give it the same kind of treatment he gave Giant Slayer. (That said, your comment would be a lot easier to read with some line or paragraph breaks; nobody likes a wall of text)
Yeah, it's that exact reason that makes me very interested in how his homebrew campaign is going to turn out. Looking forward to seeing how he designs the encounters.
“Its troy’s fault this encounter is garbage, he should take the time to basically do the AP designer’s job for him” alternatively, he could complain, end the encounter, and play a better AP, which is what he did. Huge GM win. Much better idea than the suggestions above imho.
Why can’t Joe just sit there and let and let the others play their own characters? Instead he’ll get a mad look on his face and say “it’s only 1d4 not 2d4…”
I'm so tired of randos sh**ting on Joe. Is the guy a stickler for mechanical accuracy? Sometimes a little too much for my taste! But actually having someone at the table who knows the rules really well is an asset, and he is also an incredible roleplayer who is deeply involved with the game and seems to have boundless reserves of enthusiasm, always ready and eager to engage both narratively and mechanically. A referee would count themselves lucky to have players who care about the game as much as Joe does. His style and personality play off everyone else in such entertaining ways, too-the cast shines because they all complement and elevate each other. If you read this, GCN crew, I love your work! Thanks for hours upon hours of free entertainment you've put out into the world
It’s hard to criticize him for this when half the party is constantly telling Troy straight up wrong shit. Kate even admitted this lmao. Sydney (and I like Sydney, she’d be welcome at my table) straight up is writing fanfic on how her abilities and spells half the time dude. You might notice Joe rarely tells the people who do their characters correctly how their characters work. “Joe should silently let people cheat” isn’t the take you think it is.
Not gonna lie, it was kinda cathartic for Troy to just come out and say the encounter sucks. Maybe not this encounter in general but the one being presented in this episode was a slog.
As well written as Paizo APs are generally (this one not as much), they all contain a lot of "who fucking cares?" encounters, because they're designed for XP leveling (not milestone). I'm glad Troy did that with this encounter (he should have done it more), and I sincerely hope he continues to do so in whatever they do next, if it's another 2e AP. Trim the fat, focus on the encounters that actually matter.
@@ShoobieDoobieDoo Paizo often puts more encounters than are needed for a normal party to level up. Completionist parties tend to get levels earlier than others that skip more encounters.
AP's are designed to have minimal homebrew to work, but all GMs should adapt them to their tables and playstyle. I love to change loot and switch up monsters that are harder/easier for my party to defeat. I also like adding more environmental elements to spice up the combat and give PCs more options.
Constructs and Incorporeals are the creatures you need to take a second look at, because some parties might struggle more than they should need to. These are creatures that are often fairly stronger for their level.
I agree and think Troy demonstrated exactly what a GM should do in this scenario.
@@ShoobieDoobieDoo Each AP since Sky King's Tomb actually has done away with XP as the default specifically so they could stop with filler encounters.
@@lesrek3938 That's not strictly true.
"Seven Dooms for Sandpoint" and "Season of Ghosts," at the very least, still used XP. And they came out after SKT.
This cabinet is a distillation of everything that was wrong with Gatewalkers. Meaningless encounters that just happen to be high threat simply to show off some monster from the backmatter. If it was the only thing like that, no one would mind. A single boring exhausting encounter isn't the end of the world. Unfortunately, the whole AP is littered with them and it builds increasing frustration. Nice to see Troy finally not only recognize that but also let everyone vent a bit. I have high hopes for GCP C3 with the lessons learned from all of this.
I've not played any Pathfinder (my only knowledge of it is watching the GCN play through the APs), but I've watched this one more for the players than the narrative because the story, at least as it's played out so far, has been trash. And the vast majority of that feeling has been due to these random, high-intensity-for-no-reason encounters.
The thing is, Troy should be changing these encounters. I can’t understand why he seems unwilling to put in the work to adjust this AP to make it work better for THEIR FLAGSHIP SHOW
Honestly I couldn’t imagine running any of the APs without cutting 2/3rds of the encounters. They are just too combat heavy unless your group just loves combat.
I've never heard the word backmatter. Love it, it explains exactly what is going on, "look at this cool thing we built, 'member?"
@@byronkern2295 I agree. But I think 2e is still being felt out by the crew. And they have been RAW players.
BEST EPISODE OF CAMPAIGN 2 EVER!
Thank you Troy and players for the cathartic release of so many frustrations we have felt as GMs and players with some of these encounters and rules.
I really appreciated this episode. I don't actually know the GCN crew - I'm just a schlub that listens to a lot of their stuff. That doesn't make you know somebody. So I kinda needed to know that 1) Everybody was cool with Sidney and 2) Sidney was still having a good time. Unironic respect, I'm still trying to be that chill. And while I don't know the GCN crew, I do see tired eyes every day in the mirror, and I saw them here too. I don't know you Troy, but thanks for your honesty this episode. I felt the authenticity in this episode that made me stoked for the GCN in the first place.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It means a lot to us!
Should have known it would have a high armoire class.
That joke did psychic damage.
My new years resolution this year is to finish painting 1 miniature a day and i can build up a buffer. So far ive finished 35 minis so even if i dont last the entire year it has cleared a lot of minis of my painting station. Im gaming the system finishing of all the 75% done projects feeling real clever
Amazing!
Noble pursuit
Keep at it. My own pile of shame is now ten minis. Ten and I will have no more minis to paint, said no gamer ever. It can be done.
My group noped right out of that cabinet fight. First hit, fighter is poisoned. Then slaps his forehead remembering he has an antidote potion In his pack. They all left and shut the door. Walked back to Deniigi. The fighter hands her the potion. "Here. I'm poisoned. It's fine."
I keep imagining this encounter in Blades in the Dark... 15 minutes of great storytelling.
I guess we can call this one a "drawer"
Bottlecap!
A+ for the preview of Joe.
A Pathfinder AdventurePath Designer had a really bad experiencing helping a friend move house once. Then they decided to show the world the horror of furniture.
joe masks now available in the GCP store.
Wow, you can tell how good it felt for Troy to get that off his chest. It seemed like everyone's mood improved once the combat was simply waved. I'm not sure what the players could have done differently as I'm not experienced with PF2e, but it felt like a rough combat (well, aside from get a lucky critical hit).
Other than construct their characters a little more optimally (and none of their characters are too useless), they played it well.
The thing that sucks is I’m gonna miss these characters, Buggles being chief among them
Calling the fight was a good idea. If you imagine the room as a place of, potentially explosive, alchemical experiments, it kind of makes sense that the cabinet has so much hardness. All the dangerous stuff would be stored inside it, so it wouldn't break from the experiments. Maybe :)
I feel like this is a "the gang gets killed by a mimic" title if i've ever seen one.
Hardness TEN?!?!?!
Best ending to an episode yet
The last couple of episodes really shine the light on the vitriol the cast has for campaign. I really hope they find one they all enjoy or one that Troy builds from scratch that everyone can get into. I love the makeup of this cast but, like them, it's been tough trying to get into the meat and potatoes of this campaign. Still enjoy every episode but I'm betting it's because I just enjoy listening to the GCP banter and goof.
Amazing moment of pulling the curtain away. If anything I wish more shows did this.
"two more episodes and we'll talk to an artist [about Gik Muck]."
I've got bad news on that one, Sydney...
isnt aid a circumstance bonus and bless is a status bonus so they do stack. hmm afaik live wire isnt a bard spell but it could come from an archetype
The amount of comments i see about how Troy just needs to take the time to write a new better AP in place of Gatewalkers and its his fault this AP is garbage is driving me crazy. If Troy wanted to spend hours making an encounter, I hope he homebrews something instead of trying to fix this AP. I’ve been playing tabletop since 3.5 D&D, almost two decades now and Gatewalkers is one of the worst AP’s ive seen or watched. Telling troy to just fix it is insane, it would legitimately be easier to just make something good from scratch.
Also the catharsis from Troy ragging on the AP, god bless
Winter and exercise (mentioned in banter) : I bought a relatively cheap treadmill and I walk 30 minutes/day, watching the GCN ! Best thing I ever bought.
Lack of exercise can kill you is what I learnt from nearly two years of COVID19 isolation
(i.e. cholesterol accumulated to fatal levels due to lack of mobility and there is a big genetic factor also).
Isn't it great how the body starts dying the moment it's not being used hardcore in day to day life? Things are good and food is plentiful? Time to stack the cholesterol in the arteries!
With a good tailwind, Kingston, ON is about 2.5 hours drive from Toronto (say 150 miles)
I loved the ending scene with Buggles!!
it does feel like Troy and the team have a weight lifted off of them. Of late, one or another might frustratingly ask "what are we even doing here?" when dealing with one of these high-level single-enemy deadly encounters, but in this episode they're laughing together about it
Joe was right about the "Live Wire" spell after the nerf. In PC2, Live Wire is heighten +1, add 1d4 electricity and 1d4 slashing. The nerf changes it to heighten +2.
I’m new to gm-ing, but if there’s no payoff to the encounter and you know that it’ll be a grind, as a gm wouldn’t you just skip it?
Yeah, which is why a good GM skips this whole AP😂
Serious props to whoever came up with the title, by the way
That would be Troy.
Before everyone gets too excited and grabs the Live Wire spell, errata came out for it in December too late for this episode. 'Page 248: Live wire’s damage increases far too quickly due to a typo. Change “Heightened (+1)” to “Heightened (+2)“.'
Back to minmaxer's Lord and Savior, Electric Arc (it's not as good as theorizers think it is)
@ Live wire damage increased twice as fast as electric arc - that’s a big increment. I didn’t know about it until today
I'm still working on a window XP machine at work. Don't slander my baby! Bant amazing today.
Brother Rameus isn't trained in crafting but is always rolling cigarettes. I now picture Will Ferrell's rolls in Casa De Mi Padre
7:44 is my favorite moment. I'm gonna watch it all but the opening bant was great this ep.
Something tells me the events of this episode was the final straw for the decision to bring Gatewalkers to an early finish. I've never seen Troy get frustrated in-game as a GM until this episode. I'm ride or die if GCW continued on, but I understand why they're not, especially after this. Hope that whatever comes next won't be long in the making and that it will go better.
Without fudging the cabinet's HP this was the best way to handle it. Sometimes encounters are more like puzzles. This encounter should have been written as a series of skillchecks rather than yet another enemy grind. Especially on a team that has few ways of buffing attack rolls/reducing AC.
Courageous Anthem would come in real handy here, could have turned a few 10=0 damage rolls into real damage. But sometimes encounters are solved and you're just going through the motions, better to just shrug with a "yeah yeah yeah describe your kill and let's move on."
Bless was cast by Brother Remius and it has the same bonus as Courageous Anthem. Status bonus for both.
@keithpark2044 CA gives +1 damage, Bless does not. Important when you're dealing with hardness.
I hope Paizo really takes a close look at why so many of these encounters aren't fun.
It doesn't help that Gatewalkers is really just a poorly written AP that has a ton of random encounters like this one that don't add anything of interest to the actual story.
This is a moderate encounter. It's meant to be challenging to a party of four.
Not to mention that a critical hit or reducing the creature to half HP removes is armor, which reduces its AC from 24 to 20.
Troy could've easily queued the players towards an alternative mechanic to interact with this, because this party is not geared towards this type of encounters. While a Party with a Barbarian or a Magus would make short work of it.
If I were Troy, I would've lowered the hardness to 5. That would've been much easier for this party's composition.
Troy’s made it clear he doesn’t want to scale down encounters they’re meant for 4 when he has 5 players. I think Troy just needs to remove at least 1/3 encounters from whatever they run next if it is still PF2e. The APs are stuff too combat heavy. After listening to Find the Path and hearing they remove a lot of encounters it really improves the APs at least for podcasts.
I was waiting for the episode and I knew pretty early on it was gonna be this one. I'm a gcp fan for life and I'd listen to yall talk about paint drying, but it will be cool to start a story that everyone can get into.
Is this finally the campaign-ending moment? I guess we'll see!
I've read from others this is the last recorded episode before they announced the end of their Gatewalkers campaign... It could be it. Something about Troy doing something he's never done before. I'm so excited ! I love the crew and the shows, but I also love the table drama, because it makes their game feel so real.
This is actually NOT the last recorded episode before the State of the Naish was aired.
@@TheGlassCannon :O
@@TheGlassCannon Thanks for the clarification ! I love you guys !
@@TheGlassCannon Next week confirmed to be the last recorded episode before SotN.
With the scent memory thing, I have a weird association of this cheap men's summer cologne called Nautical with the movie Ghostbusters. I saw it for the first time and it was also the first time I used the cologne. Kept the bottle just so I can get a whiff of Ghostbusters whenever I want.
I think construct armour is a bit broken at early levels. In the Starfinder 2E playtest I ran there was a statue with construct armour at level 1. It was a massive slog for the party who's only "mistake" was being unable to roll a nat 20 to break the armour. Thankfully in the reddit thread where I left the feedback a Paizo member responded.
This was such a hilarious episode to listen to. Skid’s joke at 13:54 is my favourite type of Skid humour. And all the npc meta commentary was hilarious 😂 The delivery in that last line by Troy absolute killed me!
Damn Buggles you crazy
50:27 You could have used your last action to Aid an ally on their attack. There is never a useless "third action."
A Crit will reduce its AC, which would have trivialized the fight. The meta of the game is essentially about Crit fishing. Through buffs and debuffs, you have means to somewhat control the outcome in favor of a Crit and as a group (!), you want to work toward that. This is a team-oriented game. Don't just attack creature party level +2 without flanking. Don't cast a spell without prior debuffing with Bon Mot or Demoralize.
The game is designed in a way that it assumes basic tactics (flanking) to even out the mathmatical advantage of enemies. The -2 AC due to Off-Guard is HUGE. Barnes could have flanked every time with his mirror to make things significantly easier. That would have turned your 13 on your roll to hit to an 11. So every time you encounter a single enemy, you have to set up a flank or be frustrated.
Where the hell has this buggles been the entire campaign. It'd be way more interesting if they had to contend with the Coolakahn for longer periods of time
Your grandma's wish might be that you learned to make delicious cookies.
I blame Troy for keeping this encounter in the plan
I love the encounter just unravel in that rant :D
Good call Troy, happens in most games but i agree most with 2e APs
1:23:40
OOPS ALL JOE O'BRIEN
I think the issue with this AP is that it doesn't feel very grounded. First edition APs had a grittiness to them that made them feel real even though the setting is fantastical. The stakes also don't feel very high and I'm still not sure what the plot is. 😅
Nah, Strange Aeons is incredibly high concept, and the crew is doing a great job with it. It's not the lack of grittiness hampering this AP, it's just that there's no clear reason for the PCs to keep throwing themselves at meaningless, deadly random encounters over and over and over. The AP design actively discourages the PCs from wanting to proceed.
As far as I can tell the focus spell Hymn of Healing should only cost one focus point to cast.
The title would suggest to keep a lookout for a William Hurt or Marly Matlin reference =) However.. if it's Skid mentioning it... could be an obscure Piper Laurie ref... But Somehow in my mind Skid is saying Marly Matlin. LOL Ahoy Naish
It IS the Luggage from Discworld, Skid!
I'm excited for where the main show goes. This is my favorite cast, and I want to see what they come up with next.
Nice Bring it on reference Troy 😂
Paul Winchell was the voice of the owl
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tootsie_Pop#:~:text=In%20the%20original%20television%20ad,(voiced%20by%20Paul%20Winchell).
The group dynamic is so good now! Sydney shines as a bard. Please dont end this campaign!
The cast is fantastic. If it makes you feel any better, their next characters will be just as great.
holding out a hope that the current party just goes AWOL and starts a new adventure as is without having to start from scratch
that ship has sailed i think
Was this the final ep? I'm kind of excited to see what game is selected for the pod next
This was not the final ep. We don't have a set "end date" as of yet.
Reminds me of the townfolk attacking the beast's castle in beauty and the beast
Re: Joe's Live Wire confusion, Demiplane has a typo saying heightened (+2) whereas Player Core 2 & Archives of Nethys has heightened (+1). So if he's using Demiplane for the detail that would explain that!
Not a typo, Live Wire was errata’d to now be Heightened (+2). Demiplane is correct, Archives of Nethys is not yet updated.
Live Wire has been errata'd because it was too powerful before. Scaling way too hard.
Archives of Nethys has been insanely slow on its updates.
I sympathize with Mathew, whenever I try to wake up earlier or stay up later so i can have time to freely do what I have to for myself, my family follows me... they will never be up before 9 am unless I'm up before 9 (and yes I am quite about it) for real 4:30 in the morning and the whole dam house is up like its noon 😮💨
I'm a Halston guy. The secret to any perfume or cologne is using less than you think you need. The idea is to supplement, not replace, what you naturally smell like.
Only works if you don't naturally smell like wet dog and manure
I can’t wait to fight a cabinet in a Paizo AP. Exciting stuff
Too bad there wasn’t a way for the bard to permanently charm the cabinet, so it could follow her around like a pet and she could store things in it… Akin to the trunk from Diskworld… and even casually ride in one of the drawers.
The bard was at a loss for a third action but Courageous Anthem had yet to be cast?
This was a funny episode
Skid's the best
I am disappointed to be losing the characters in this adventure, both PCs and NPCs
As someone playing Gateswalker, who hated this cabinet with all my heart.... Troy has all the ability in the world to fix this campaign, but if you just run straight through with the AP it's a slog. There's plenty of tools to balance the encounters, and the AP has been out long enough for there to be rather public fixes offered.
And to be a bigger jerk, how Troy expects to make a game when he only runs directly from the book is.... I hope you guys stick with pathfinder.
ahh... I'm late... blue jackets are fire right now.
Amazing. I'm happy Troy is as tired with this AP as the rest of the cast. On to bigger and better things!
"Live wire" is available as an Arcane or Primal cantrip .. .Bards cast Occult spells. Something else going on here?
My new years resolution is to achieve my
🌌d⭐e⭐s⭐t⭐i⭐n⭐y🌌
Go Buggles!
Troy definitely need to run his own stuff and throw out the script. Aka, embrace his inner GM. Anyways, Paizo has seen a steady decline in their APs quality, everything they write now is un-iconic and asepticized.
I love the khan
Livewire increases damage every 2 spell ranks. The reason for this is that it increases bt 2d4 each increment instead of just 1d4 like most cantrips. So you have in essence a really bad cantrip damage rank every other rank, and a normal rank the rest. This is balanced due to the cantrip being able to not only hit two weaknesses, but theoretically applying weakness twice per one use if said target had weakness to both slashing and electricity damage.
So Joe is 100% right here. Paizo should change the heightened dialog to say every rank a spell heightens instead of using +1, +2 etc. I know it's word count reasons but it causes a lot of confusion to the average person.
IIRC livewire recently got erratad to be heightened +2 from +1. AoN still has the old spell description of +1 so I’m guessing they were both correctly reading what was in front of them but the info Syd has was out of date and Joes wasn’t.
@@silentbob71190 Maybe? It seemed like Syd was referring to what a character sheet was doing not reading an entry?
@@Zygoth80 Yea I just meant in general whatever they were each looking at be it the spell description online, a character sheet etc that Syds was out of date and Joes was updated with the current Errata. Im guessing they don’t use the same character builders nowadays since it’d be weird if they were displaying differently
Frustrating fight. I just wanted to toss in that Live Wire isnt occult. Maybe she has access to it from a feat though.
Yes, it's not immune but resistant. Yes its made of wood, but go home and hold a flame to any wood in your home and it will not instantly combust. I have to explain this to my players alot too. Lol
👏👏👏
Average Joe moment
Interesting that Troy is talking about how the encounter and the payoff suck at 1:44:00. Troy, you're the GM. You are in charge of designing and running the encounters and the encounter payoff. That's your responsibility. And if the AP (gatewalkers is notoriously bad) is written with poor encounters, then as a GM you need to adjust them. The players can complain about the encounters, but its a bit weird that the GM complains about the encounters as if he's just along for the ride? Troy, you're the one that's supposed to ensure the encounters and payoffs are worth playing - including changing the AP as written if need be!
The GM is a player too bro. If the AP sucks, it isn’t reasonable to ask the Gm to put in that much extra effort dude. How many hours of work do you expect Troy to put into this one encounter?
This AP just sucks.
@Tecmaster96 troy chose this ap. As a pathfinder gm myself I know how much work it is to run an AP - that's the task you take on when you decide to gm an adventure. It's weird to complain about the encounter when you're the one who decided to run it in that manner. Ultimately, the responsibility for providing cool and meaningful encounters rests on the GMs shoulders.
@@gsfjohndoe bad take imo. If an AP is so bad you can’t run it without significantly rejiggering it, the value adddd over just homebrewing something yourself is significantly lost. After all, you pay money for an AP, and not to homebrew so one presumes the AP should be able to be run without significantly rejiggering it. But clearly not, and there’s always endless defenders saying GM’s should pay money for the privilege of homebrewing licensed content.
Like fr, the idea that you’d pay money to correct someone else’s shoddy work is…. Comical. If you have to do the work yourself, skip the payment process and make it yourself. Or just type “make me a bad encounter in pathfinder 2e” into chatGPT, that’s also free compared to paying Paizo.
Put it to you one way. I can change the oil in my car or I can take it to the shop. If I choose to pay to take it to the shop, and they do the oil change wrong, and I saw someone online saying any good mechanic would double check their mechanics work, for several hours, I’d laugh. That simply doesn’t make sense. I can just change the oil myself.
@Tecmaster96 if he didn't like the encounter he should have just skipped it. As a gm, that's also his call. Here it seems he's just following the ap without preparing and that's just lazy GMing, period. Ultimately, it's troys responsibility to provide cool encounters. He should cut the ones that aren't worth it, or improve them, his call. But to choose to run a shitty encounter and then complain that the encounter you chose to run sucks is simply bad GMing.
To use your analogy: troy chose to buy a shitty car, refuses to either do work on it or pay to have work done on it by someone else, but insists on still driving it while complaining about how it sucks.
to be fair, I may be wrong but I thought I read that Troy chose this AP based on what was available when campaign 2 started, i.e. book 1 and an outline for the remaining books
Meh. Boo. If the encounter as written isn't working, you change it to make it work without telling the players that's what you are doing. Have a secondary group of NPCs show up to make the fight a three-way and change the dynamics (raiders, a bounty hunter, a monster hunter, or maybe a thief that needs the antidote and uses their distraction to steal it). Maybe give the monster a phase 2 that simultaneously makes it more of a threat, but lowers the DR, or give it a soft enrage, where they see it starts destroying the shop as it hops around angrily and there's a threat each round it remains alive that it is going to accidentally destroy the antidote, so they have to change their stand-off tactics and enter the building to finish it off. You certainly don't tell the players there's nothing of note in the apothecary shop so the whole thing is a waste of time, that you're bored of the fight and just declare they win. That's hugely boring. Also, they've rolled multiple Fan Fumbles in each fight and you just skipped any further likely fumbles. Troy read the encounter and knew this would happen going in by his own admission. Sometimes I don't understand Troy's thinking. He clearly modifies encounters, especially RP encounters, when he reads the room and plays off of the the crew as they ad lib, but with most fights he seemingly can't or won't improvise while simultaneously making clear he's not enjoying what is happening.
Troy doesn't seem that engaged with the AP or system these days. And considering how much he's leaning on just playing encounters straight, I doubt he's doing a lot of prep.
That's less of a problem if the AP you're running is decent, and has a lot of varied encounters and options to pull from. But Gatewalkers is... Not a decent AP. It needs a lot of love, and Troy doesn't seem willing/able to give it the same kind of treatment he gave Giant Slayer.
(That said, your comment would be a lot easier to read with some line or paragraph breaks; nobody likes a wall of text)
Yeah, it's that exact reason that makes me very interested in how his homebrew campaign is going to turn out. Looking forward to seeing how he designs the encounters.
“Its troy’s fault this encounter is garbage, he should take the time to basically do the AP designer’s job for him” alternatively, he could complain, end the encounter, and play a better AP, which is what he did. Huge GM win. Much better idea than the suggestions above imho.
Why can’t Joe just sit there and let and let the others play their own characters? Instead he’ll get a mad look on his face and say “it’s only 1d4 not 2d4…”
It's because he's trying to keep everyone honest and double checking rules. He's always been like this.
I'm so tired of randos sh**ting on Joe.
Is the guy a stickler for mechanical accuracy? Sometimes a little too much for my taste! But actually having someone at the table who knows the rules really well is an asset, and he is also an incredible roleplayer who is deeply involved with the game and seems to have boundless reserves of enthusiasm, always ready and eager to engage both narratively and mechanically.
A referee would count themselves lucky to have players who care about the game as much as Joe does. His style and personality play off everyone else in such entertaining ways, too-the cast shines because they all complement and elevate each other.
If you read this, GCN crew, I love your work! Thanks for hours upon hours of free entertainment you've put out into the world
@@manicpixiedreambuoy All true, now just quit telling everyone how to play their characters.
It’s hard to criticize him for this when half the party is constantly telling Troy straight up wrong shit. Kate even admitted this lmao. Sydney (and I like Sydney, she’d be welcome at my table) straight up is writing fanfic on how her abilities and spells half the time dude. You might notice Joe rarely tells the people who do their characters correctly how their characters work.
“Joe should silently let people cheat” isn’t the take you think it is.
Love you guys. Hate the opening generic hip-hop crap.