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2018-10-23, 08:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
New update buffs blasting a bit, but that still runs into inflated monster saves anyway - with the underlying maths of the system, you're likely doing 75% or less of the actual listed damage overall due to high reflex granting lots of successes/critical successes.
The use of universal +level to everything and the 4 tiered success/fail system seems to be causing more issues than solving. Tight maths is fine on a non-flat RNG, but on a flat RNG it leads to a feeling of homogenisation to me.Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-23, 08:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2008
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
This appeal I don't see, maybe because it does not feel right for any of the genres that the game nominally supports. Sure, classic adventure or pulp adventure don't have blatantly superhuman characters, but D'Artagnan or Solomon Kane still shouldn't be in any actual danger when going against mook #34. Things get worse in contests other than stabbing each other, because with exploding dice a d4 has about 15-20% chance of beating a d12. Neither I think that the math which in some cases punishes you for having nominally higher ability (for example a difficulty 6 test is easier with a d4 than a d6, because of the reroll on a max value) is a feature rather than a bug.
Fair enough. Maybe my perception is skewed because of overtly simple characters generated by my group.Last edited by FatR; 2018-10-23 at 08:26 AM.
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2018-10-24, 03:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
A quote on the addition of level to everything.
Originally Posted by Jason Buhlman
"Currently, we are not considering at removing it from the system, and we do not think that this thread is the appropriate place for us to discuss our reasoning."
Bam, much better. Doesn't come off as just not wanting to explain.Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-24, 05:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2008
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Level to everything (except maybe initiative) should have been implemented in DnD long ago. It's tiring to still see the game pretending that my character who can beat T-Rexes and 10-feet tall giants with skin of stone in hand-to-hand combat, effortlessly even, is still forced into the "action movie hero" definition of realism outside of combat; and if you have some stats fall behind by design, that makes items to boost them mandatory and creates the genre-inappropriate Christmas Tree syndrome without fail.
The problem with PF2 skill implementation are as follows:
(1) Generally underpowered and still too much number-crunching for too little payoff.
(2) Some skill uses that probably should be trained-only aren't.
(3) You have to ultraspecialize in a skill to get decent results reliably. That will still not make you outclass someone who totally disregarded the skill to the point where the latter cannot compete.
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2018-10-24, 06:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Why though? Why shouldn't a character be allowed to not get better at certain things? Why should the classic fantasy archetypes of the stoic, grouchy master swordsman or the absent-minded archmage be off limits, to name just two? Because that's what +level to skills does. It means that a 20th level character, even if untrained and with 8 charisma, is a better talker than the most silver-tongued 1st level bard. Or that the 20th level archmage who is infamously absorbed in his own internal world can spot the sneakiest 1st level thief.
I've seen this confronted with "Oh you can just declare that your character autofails at those things" which is just bull, because that can be used to justify literally everything. By that logic, every character should be able to fly and shoot lasers out their eyes because if you don't like that you can just "declare that your character can't do those things". We should have to justify why a character is good at the things they're good at, not why a character isn't good at what they aren't good at. It makes no sense from a character-building sense nor an in-world sense.
I actually think 13th Age's implementation of Backgrounds is a much better way of adding +level for skills. You pick between 2 and 8 (depending how you choose to distribute your points) broad-ish areas that reflect your character, and then roll those when they are relevant. That way it's not automatically every skill ever, but it also means that nobody gets left behind.Last edited by Minion #6; 2018-10-24 at 06:09 AM.
Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-24, 06:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Some things need to scale with level, other things don't. Most of the things that don't need to scale with level should be almost completely independent of it. For example, there's really no reason for level to effect your Knowledge checks at all. There are low level characters who are very good at knowledge (like the various sages and academics players might consult) and high level characters who are very bad at knowledge (like the stereotypical ignorant Barbarian). On the other hand, while it is totally acceptable for characters to have bad defenses, those defenses shouldn't get relatively worse as they level up. A Rogue should succeed more on Reflex saves than a Fighter, but he shouldn't succeed more more at 20th level than at 2nd.
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2018-10-24, 06:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2016
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Since PCs are wildcards, the difference between a d4 and a d6 on a TN-2 (need to roll a 6) is 32.3% and 30.6% chance of success. That particular math blip is real, but it really doesn't come up that much. (TN is 4 normally).
So yeah a d4 approaches a 20% to out roll a d12, meanwhile a d12 Wildcard vs a d4 extra loses 7.2% of the time.
Solomon Kane is basically a normal dude, why wouldn't mook #34 be a threat to him? If you want Super heroes in Savage Worlds that just "out level" certain threats, you use the Superpowers Companion for that. Savage Worlds does a better job at keeping casters and martials equivalent (to tie this back to Pathfinder) both tend to get their stronger abilities at the same time. So if you want a Super mage, your party is also going to have super martials. It's up to the players and the GM how much verisimilitude limits what characters can do, but if you gave your Wizard 80 superpower points so that he can play like a high level 3e Wizard and you gave the Fighter no points, then you have a clear mechanical indicator of why these two aren't balanced next to each other.
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2018-10-24, 07:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2008
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
The main reason is that they most certainly aren't fantasy archetypes. They are, at most, DnD archetypes, and I've already mentioned upthread, that DnD has a big problem with being incestuous. "Master swordsman"? I'm really, really, really struggling to remember a single fantasy main character whose whole specialization was "being a swordsman". Conan was nowhere near this narrow - he was good with just about any weapon, while also being an expert thief, an expert wilderness survivalist, at least competent seaman, and a great warlord. He was a low-level character. In stories with high-level characters world-class sword mastery is something that Zelgadis or Rand al'Thor pick up as a side skill, in whatever time they have free from learning earth-shaking magic. "Absent-minded archmage"? Actually, can't remember one even in DnD. The only well-known DnD mage who was not good at anything but magic was Raistlin.
And you know, the realization that there is a big damn problem with DnD classes being too narrow to portray iconic fantasy characters occurred not today or yesterday, but all the way back in the eighties. At that point, admittedly, there was no easily acceptable method of solving the problem, because the notion of straight-up superhuman warriors and fighting magic did not penetrate the fantasy genre. Nowadays, thanks to anime, computer games, and SFX advances allowing for crazier stuff in live action movies, it did.
I see no problem whatsoever with either. You're comparing a living god with a talented but inexperienced mortal here. A 20th-level character may exert such pressure on common men with his mere presence, that they will agree to anything, with utmost sincerity even, just to avoid contradicting him to his face. A 20th level achmage who is absorbed in his internal world probably had long since made that world external, and besides that, to reach 20th level he climbed a mountain of corpses, many of which belonged to living shadows, and finest dark elf assassins, and stalker demons, and things that do not even fully exist in our universe, so it stands to reason that his absent-mindedness does not prevent him from mechanically and without looking catching knives aimed at his back or zapping overconfident thieves.
If you don't like that, you of course can tone down power level as a whole. But not only that would be genre-inappropriate, because DnD, besides just a few unintentional outliers, already was falling behind the crazier stuff from fantasy in its 3.X incarnations, given the reaction to PF2 people are not satisfied with that.Last edited by FatR; 2018-10-24 at 07:25 AM.
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2018-10-24, 07:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
I disagree that 3.5 had real difficulties statting mainstream fantasy characters. Statting them with one class? Yes. Statting them at all? No.
Give me 20 levels and I can absolutely build the 7 deadly sins in 3.5 or PF. Which is reasonable since they are the best characters in a kingdom of high level magical knights. I don’t think I can build any of them in PF2, even the giant, which should be easy.
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2018-10-24, 08:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2016
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2018-10-24, 08:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Sometimes. A lot of important powers can be worked out with templates or items. A bigger issue is how not to give them extraneous powers. Meliodas’ entire schtick, for example, is the spellthief power that lets him absorb enemy spells and throw them back, but I can’t give him that without a mound of spell casting (I could also model it as spell turning, but that probably comes with even more casting). That’s where point based systems are better than classed ones for exactly duplicating characters. Still, I can get there.
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2018-10-24, 09:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2018
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
I largely agree. A few simple things like dropping 2+Int Skills, (except for Wizard and Witch, Int based Classes), updating a few of the weaker Core Classes, or those that lack many fun Class Features to be more on par with APG or other Classes, a bit of Arcane Spell nerfs would have probably done the job.
Personally, Im not a fan of easier or more streamlined systems, and I do not get this <hopefully a> fad to make that a primary design goal. It causes as many issues as it fixes.
One thing I do think might help with martial vs caster issues could be a small change to how spells work from 3.5/PF, so that they have a better lesser effect, that is more consistent, but are less likely to have the full, encounter ending ones.
So for example with Sleep, instead of knocking out targets the fail their save, maybe have it apply a -2 to everything for being groggy, (save is irrelevent), and only those that roll a Nat 1, (or maybe fail the Save by 5 or 10) fall asleep.
This would make spells more overall reliable, (as a player, wasting a spell that does absolutely nothing sucks), while being less swingy overall, whuch means designers do nnot need to worry about it as much, and when it does have it's full effect, it feels kind of like a crit.Last edited by Beckett; 2018-10-24 at 09:51 AM.
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2018-10-24, 09:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2016
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
It depends on the design philosophy.
I personally dislike "streamlined" systems like 5e where the devs say "changes the rules willy nilly they don't matter"
I personally prefer system where the devs say, "Look you are free to do whatever you want at your table and we encourage building on the system, but at least try out the rules before changing them so you at least know what all the possible knock-on effects you'll need to deal with for that change. But we do not actually recommend changing the rules."
To me, the later shows a level of care and confidence in their rules even if it is a vastly simpler system than something like 3.5/PF. I'm kind'of burned on "rulings over rules" of things like 5e. I much prefer when a dev instead adds rulings for edge cases which would create undo complexity to cover.
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2018-10-24, 10:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-10-24, 10:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2018
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
I think their intended goal was to remove discussions and arguements, but in practice it just means different sides all point to the same Rule Zero thing, and nothing really happens and no one really learns anything new.
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2018-10-24, 12:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Streamlining is all well and good if done well... but it actually has to be done well.
PF2 doesn't really do streamlined at all - it's only "more streamlined" overall if you just think that 'less splatbooks = more streamlined' or 'less bonus types = more streamlined'. Character creation is more complex, certainly, with even the simplest classes having lots of decision points between a lot of bland stuff. Overtuned monsters crit far too often, especially if you deviate from the "Max your primary stat and then Dex to avoid crit city" build that works best for essentially every class. Things that sound like they should just be basic skill uses are made into feats you have to take - picking pockets, recognising spells, making connections, and so on. Even the underlying mathematical framework requires more legwork to get working, requiring optimising to get >50% success rates in far too many cases.
Even 5e, the streamlining of which touted by it's dedicated base, doesn't do it properly. It's streamlined in that it isn't a complete system - skills are really more "Mother May I/Guess What The GM Thinks" than a representation of any in-world ability, bounded accuracy on a flat RNG makes rolls feel really swingy (and vastly over-inflates the value of things like Animate Dead or Animate Object), Advantage/Disadvantage makes any ad-hoc strategies mechanically identical - I could go on for a long time here. The whole game seems to run on one big Oberoni fallacy - can't say the rules are bad if the GM is expected to just adjudicate everything that's not combat (and non-trivial amounts of combat) on the fly.Last edited by Minion #6; 2018-10-24 at 12:06 PM.
Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-24, 12:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2013
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
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2018-10-24, 12:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2018
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2018-10-24, 12:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-24, 01:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Side note, but I've never understood the reasoning behind the "every roll should be tense" design philosophy they're using here. A game is a series of interesting decisions. Every decision should be tense, not every roll.
I agonize over whether or not to use a grenade in XCOM all the time, and there's no RNG attached to thatLast edited by n00b17; 2018-10-24 at 01:48 PM.
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2018-10-24, 01:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
I'm working on a spiritual semi-successor in that it's focused around lateral problem-solving, tactical combat, and a deep build system, under the working name Artifice. It's going to take a lot of cues from PF2 like the feat system and action system and a magic system built around resonance, but trying to allow the same depth of character creation as 3.5 and PF. 1st draft will likely go up in a month or two. It'll also have a Turing-Complete spell creation system if that floats your boat
Last edited by n00b17; 2018-10-24 at 01:58 PM.
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2018-10-24, 02:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Spoiler5e is the placebo RPG. It doesn't do much, and literally everything it does do is done better by other RPGs. Despite all the evidence though, some people still swear by it.
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2018-10-24, 02:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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2018-10-24, 02:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Avatar made by Mehangel - "Neigh?"
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2018-10-24, 04:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2017
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2018-10-24, 05:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
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2018-10-24, 06:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
My Homebrew
Healer: Pathfinder remake of the 3.5 class of the same name. Light, restoration, and more positive energy effects than you can shake a cleric at.
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2018-10-24, 07:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
Oh, that's rather simple. If it doesn't matter, don't roll the dice in the first place. PF1 had the unfortunate tendency to generate auto success / failures results due to stacking boni / not investing anything, which pretty much undermined the reason why you roll in the first place.
And no, not every "decision" should be tense. This is why 4E had minion and PF2 adds +level to anything, so you can simply mow down those pesky goblins and be a big damn hero.
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2018-10-24, 11:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
Re: Pathfinder 2 Playtest 2nd Edition: If it ain't broke, still fix it.
I totally agree that in those situations you shouldn't be rolling dice. But just because it doesn't involve a dice roll, that doesn't mean there's no decision. "Should I kill the king in his sleep" has a ton of repercussions and is a really interesting decision even if you don't have to roll for it.
With the minions example, you're still making decisions about what abilities to use, how to position, whether you should blow your daily now or save it for later, which enemies are in the most threatening position, etc. It's not like you have no options but to stand in one place and say "I attack" over and over. Decisions =/= rolls with a high chance of failure, and trying to design as if they're the same leads you to replace interesting decisions with straight-up randomness to "make the roll more tense". There's no point to randomness in the first place unless there's a decision involved about how to mitigate its risk to the player.Last edited by n00b17; 2018-10-25 at 12:04 AM.
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2018-10-25, 01:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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