julian
For me it was whips. They seemed like the ultimate Rogue weapon, but the Martial classification made it way too feat-intensive. I can't wait to play with one!
At my table we added the Divine Lance change (ie, it can actually do damage to things,) as well as ignoring the Open trait, giving Rogues access to martial weapons and Wizards access to simple weapons. Other stuff we'll probably wait for the books to come out.
The one that comes with it is fine. Please note that there are multiple computers under the name "Yoga," some are very cheap. I have a first generation Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The X380 Yoga and others in that series are apparently also very good. The cheap ones are not.
Absolutely agree. For absolute newbies I tend to nudge them toward playing as Merisiel or something similar for the first oneshot, just so they can get a feel for the basic rules before needing to master their character quirks. We of course had someone who had never played PF insist on playing an Inventor for their first character, and after we finished the oneshot they realized that they'd missed their main class feature the whole time and that's why they felt so ineffective. Whoops!
I am mildly afraid of this myself, as I'll be running the Beginner's Box soon for a group of 4 with custom-built characters. All of us have played PF2e a little bit, but not enough to necessarily know what's a good choice mechanically or tactically.
And yeah, the other day I was working on character art with a friend for our next PF2e game and he used "tower shield" as an input. We got Big Ben in the background, and a small shield. 💀 This stuff requires a lot of finessing to get usable output.
Absolutely. I have been using tablet PCs since 2011, all of which have run desktop operating systems. My first was an ASUS that ran Windows 7, which I used for school and later for TTRPG. OneNote was excellent software which got me through that phase of my life.
I later upgraded to a laptop-type tablet instead of a slate with a Bluetooth keyboard. I find the format more convenient. The Yoga has been excellent for me — though I don't like the keyboard a lot as I'm used to the chunkier type. The pen has a battery so I do have to pause to charge it after a few hours of writing/drawing, but that has been nice because it forces me to take breaks (which can be hard when you have ADHD!) The pen is a bit narrow and now super ergonomic, but there are many compatible styluses out there that are larger.
As for software, I've switched to Linux as of many years ago and up until recently there were not many good apps out there for handwritten notes. Xournal++ is ugly but good for marking up PDFs. Rnote is a very new app, written in Rust and designed around GNOME design principles, so it looks very nice and is quite fast. It's not a 1:1 replacement for OneNote — it has basic file management but not as advanced as OneNote's notebooks and tabs and pages, and there is no OCR for searching within your handwriting. I would not use it to do worldbuilding, but it has been more than good enough for me to take rough notes as I play.
The downside of the Yoga is that it has soldered RAM, so you need to get one with good enough specs right off the bat. I purchased a 16GB model and it has been sufficient, though the processor is a downgrade from my last laptop. I still use my desktop for beefier jobs. One example of where it struggles is that when I played 5e with a group, if I rolled digital dice on DND Beyond the performance was quite slow. This seemed to be an issue for everyone on a laptop, though.
No problem! Here's an example of what I made with this technique:
Rnote is a dedicated handwriting app. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga (first gen.)
As a GM:
I host online for friends, so we use digital tools.
- Foundry, hosted on my desktop computer, with these modules:
- Dice So Nice, and several skins.
- Dice Tray, to make rolling single dice easier.
- Pathbuilder Importer mostly for my lazy players.
- Obsidian, for when I'm running homebrew. But with the revamping of Foundry's journal system, I may stop using this.
- Discord for game audio.
As a player:
I have a tablet PC with a pen. I take notes on Rnote (free, open source.) I used to use OneNote which was great because I could search my handwriting, but I stopped using Windows.
Historically, I always used physical dice because I was playing in-person. I did my PF1e character sheets manually by writing on the PDF in OneNote, but for PF2e I do enjoy Pathbuilder to help me plan it out. For actual play, I build my character sheet in Foundry (even if the GM isn't using it for the game) just to make everything easy for me to find.
You might find the comments here helpful. I use Foundry to run the game and Obsidian to plan. Foundry recently had a journal update that may help me move everything onto Foundry.