Bluenose's page

Is Baldur's Gate 3 going to be any good? I've heard not great things about it. Maybe they've improved it since then. I heard character customization by class and such not a thing. Pre-generated characters. And you can't create your own party.

I don't know where you heard there was no character customisation, because the beta has had that from the very start and hasn't had pre-generated characters to play. Whether it's a good game will always be a matter of opinion but I'd be very doubtful that all the time they've spent on their character generation system in the beta is going to be thrown away when the full game comes out later this year. And all their publicity up to the most recent Panel From Hell earlier this week has discussed creating your own characters.

Sanityfaerie wrote:

Alchemic_Genius wrote:

Really, what I find most bothersome is how what people want in a samurai class (ie long actions that involve drawing their sword in some fashion, or features revolving around drawing and sheathing repeatedly) doesn't actually reflect the fighting style at all.

The thing is, a lot of the folks who are interested in this stuff don't want to play "historically accurate samurai". They want to play things like "that one guy from Samurai Shodown", and Samurai Shodown had a guy who was constantly drawing and re-sheathing.

The biggest problem with Samurai as a class (or any historic archetype, but Asian ones get it strongest because anime) is the gulf between "I want to play an aristocratic horseback fighter" people and "I want fight a full plate demon mask godkiller who does an Omnislash with his katana" folks.

I remember how in PF1 Paizo did the dragoon archetype that wanted to be both a historic dragoon and FF4 Dragoon. It didn't really work ;)

That's what levels are for. People seem able to manage the idea that they don't start the game as Lina Inverse but have to work up to it; they can presumably also grasp the idea that they'll start as the aristocratic mounted warrior and work up to slaughtering people by the force of their ki-shout and waving a sword in their direction.

Gortle wrote:

Temperans wrote:

The biggest issue with the whole spellbook thing is how we had to quote like 8 different sections just to figure out how this one thing works. Which is honestly insane amount of book flipping.

That is something that doesn't get talked about enough. In order to play a caster you have to flip through a bunch of pages just to kind of understand a bit of the rules, then still fail because you forgot about another rule. By comparison the biggest issue martials have is companions.

The only way to avoid that flipping is literally memorizing the rules, or actively having cheat sheets. Which just reinforces the whole "you have to master the system just to play properly".

******************
Before anyone says "but I didn't have issues" or "this doesn't affect a lot of players". No, this is clunky design and it only seems good if you have a computer/pdf where you can search for things. Heck that design principle is why Pathbuilder is so encouraged to even make characters in the first place, since it cuts down on all the page flipping.

Tell me about it. I'm despairing over Kingmaker kingdom rules at the moment. I need at least 4 windows open at different pages in the rules. I'd hate to think how bad it would be if I was using the physical book not the PDF. Then the players have separate rules with different page numbers. The last two sessions have just been rolling kingdon activities.

Have fun with that. I've had to write a bunch of modifications. So far it doesn't the payoff of first edition kingdom building rules which is causing the player that used to enjoy that part of kingdom building to lose interest. I may just let them build buildings without rolls and use rolls only for interesting tasks.

In the 1st edition Kingdom Building rules, it was a build lots of magic shops and become powerful. A little different in this one. I may wing it more to make it more interesting.

Possibly try Horizon of the Vast, the Starfinder AP - often called Kingmaker in Space. It's got decent rules which seem like they'd adapt to PF. Yes, it's SF and the terminoogy needs adapting but I remember it being quite decent in giving different ways to develop the colony which aren't so much, "Just do this and prosper".

Katana, Kama, Kusarigama, Daikyu, Flintlock Firearms (copied from occident), Naginata, Tekko-Kagi, Sai, Tonfa, Tekko-Kagi.

That'd be matchlocks, historically. Flintlocks were hardly used anywhere before the 1620s at the earliest and Japan's great era of firearms in warfare started much earlier - and finished earlier, with the Tokugawa victory.

I'm kinda wondering if I should try giving them feedback and make account for being able to respond to survey even though I don't think I'm target audience :p

Having *just* people who are fans of 5e respondwill certainly lead to something almost exactly like a repeat of 5e.

Not that I imagine feedback being a large part of the design. Considering it's coming out in 2024 - presumably at Origins - then they pretty much have to be doing the printing, final layout and editing by the start of the year. But with 11 classes, sub-classes, feats across multiple levels, most classes are likely to be one packet. Four weeks between packets, 44 weeks just on the classes, and you're around the end of July next year just through character generation. Possibly later allowing for holidays. Can't see that leading to significant changes once they've "assessed" a particular class. And then there's the rest of the rules, assuming they mean to do anything different with those.

For Carrion Crown I'd look at Swords of the Serpentine. Based off Gumshoe, so good at investigation and basically otherwise a Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork/Sanctuary simulator.
Actually let me post the description on the Pelgrane site:

Swords of the Serpentine offers:
A fantasy city of mystery and magic inspired by Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork
Tools for fast and effective character creation
A customized combat system that opens the door for cinematic, heroic battles
Social combat that targets your enemy’s morale, letting you defeat some foes through wit, guile, and threats
Sorcery that allows you to rip apart a tower with the flick of a hand—but are you willing to pay the price in corruption to body and soul?
Powerful allegiances that give you influence in one or more factions across the city, but which can earn you equally powerful enemies…
Streamlined abilities that power four distinct types of heroes, and which you can mix-and-match across professions to customize your character further
Gameplay and rules mechanics that encourage players to help build the world they’re adventuring in
Rules for death curses, true names, alchemy, sorcerous items, ghostly possession, political manipulation, and more!

I reckon it woill work well a couple of the other paths once it becomes commonly available (I got it via pre-order, so my copy is one of the early batch).

Verzen wrote:

It also interferes with a lot of the fantasy. Like.. I'm getting lightning reflexes as a... wizard? Okay...

Verzen wrote:

I also dislike increasing 4 stats by +2 every 5 levels. It makes all the characters 'feel' the same. Especially at 20 when everyone is likely +18 in most of their stats.

Yep

"With everyone super, no one will be"

If some of the more hyperbolic statements about casters are treated as true and it's worthless to play them, then you have exactly that situation where some classes are Super and some aren't. You should be pleased by that, or does this only work when your preferred classes are the ones getting to be superior?

Ill probably grab them both. I was expecting to spend around 100 bucks.

I'd suggest a couple of cans of spray primer - one white and one black - and if you've a local craft/hobby store selling acrylic painting sets that they'll be a better buy than ones that are for models, and you're very unlikely to notice a difference. They'll also sell decent brushes. The top advice I have is to get a decent light that'll swivel, and a magnifying glass with a stand for the detail work.

Also, if you're going to be painting any designs onto shields, take a look at some historical miniatures sites where they sell medievals and see if they've got shield transfers for the figures - I use Battle Flag or LBMS but there are plenty more, and they're a lot easier and better quality than anything most people can paint (or that I can paint, at any rate).

Specifically its causing a trickle down effect to other games, while the majority of 5e players only play 5e, its proportionally swelling the subset of players that try and enjoy other games, basically the more people who try the gateway game, the more end up following through to trying other things, even if most still don't.

For an example, Kickstarter had a total of two tabletop RPG projects pass $1,000,000 in it's history. Until this month, with two more passing that amount (The One Ring 2e and Seeker's Guide to Twisted Taverns) and several others taking over $100k. While I don't think all of that is a result of 5e, there's undeniably an increase in the amount of money being around tabletop RPGs.

So... you're saying that you think daggers should be in the sword weapon group instead of the knife group? That's an interesting take to try to justify.

("It's the same thing but smaller" doesn't really hold up well).

"It's used in a similar way, but is smaller," seems like a reasonable contention for why some weapons should be grouped together. Maybe that means splitting up the "Sword" group, as there are weapons in there which are used in very different ways (also true in other categories and even individual weapons). Split it into three, Versatile Metal Blade, Pointy Metal Blade, Slicy Metal Blade, make sure the Versatile aren't as good at Pointy stuff as Pointies and as good at Slicy stuff as the Slicies, and you'll probably have enough things in every category to satisfy most people.

The obvious thrown weapon for the sword group is the dagger. Plenty of those were designed with throwing in mind, usually as a secondary option.

Based on the Roll20 numbers, for every 50 people playing D&D in a city, there's 10 who play CoC, 6 that play Pathfinder, 1 that plays World of Darkness, and 1/2 that plays Star Wars. To get a group together to play FFG's Star Wars in person with a full group of 5 you need to be in a community large enough to support 250 D&D players. Which probably means medium sized city.

And if one of those players is someone you just don't gel with, then you're S.O.L.

Some of that is probably down to how well the game in question plays online as opposed to in person. I'm not experienced with FFG Star Wars but I don't think it'd work well as an online game, so people might not be creating online groups for it. It's dice mechanic really isn't ideal for non F2F play.

The Rot Grub wrote:

Lightning Raven wrote:

Let's just come out and say it then: They thought that because they were veterans, they could apply their vast and curated well of knowledge in RPG's to this system and they failed. Because in other systems, your knowledge was basically "What feat to I have to take next level so I can gain a +1 somewhere?", so they chose several of those feats, called it a build, and forgot they had the feat because it was baked into their sheet. And that's it. The most novelty builds were those that chose a combat maneuver to break and those builds were awesome... When they worked, the first enemy immune to them and the player started crying.

When Cody said in his 2nd video something to the effect of: "My critics will be SURPRISED that my players are between 40 and 60 years old!", not only did he pull the "I'm old so I know what I'm doing" card, but it also betrayed exactly this problem you described.

Their 20+ years of experience has almost no relevance to what's being discussed here. Sure, perhaps they knew what hit points and AC were, and other things you just know after playing tons of other TTRPGs. But because PF2 is its own game what matters more toward your ability to play is your experience playing PF2. The fact that, to Cody, what was more important was his group's experience with other RPGs tells a lot about how wrong -- and hubristic -- they were going into the game.

Especially if their experience was focused on a handful of systems rather than being very broad. Lots of experience with D&D and PF1 gives you some skill, but broad experience with lots of different games can let you get good at adapting to different systems.

Of course, even then you can fall prey to assuming that superficial similarities will run deeper than they really do. I definitely remember that hitting my group when we started playing 3.0. It was easy to miss how important the build game was and how some of the roles had changed, because you could just start with characters much like AD&D character with a few extra options.

I have to say that I wouldn't think of someone as a veteran who hadn't played AD&D before 3.0 came out (consider there are people with 40+ years of experience with RPGs). And if they got through that, then they're well aware that games sometimes make very large changes from one edition to the next. That is a theme with modern D&D, after all. Any sort of appeal to experience that doesn't allow for changes from one edition to the next seems a little odd when experienced players are involved and have been through the same before.

Two days later and it has dropped out of the top 10

Back at No.3 as of now. Being beaten by Matthew McConaughey's autobiography and Barack Obama's autobiography. 111 in Amazon UK, and I think it's fair to say that no RPG is likely to make Top-10 place in the UK.

Do we have any example that is not Gandalf of a Wizard using weapons?

Because one is an exception rather than a rule.

Go outside European mythology and folk tales and they're not too uncommon. Taoist exorcists in Chinese magical fantasy usually employ both magic and a weapon (usually a monk's spade) even as novices, for instance. There are some in post-Tolkein/post-D&D fantasy - it's hard to tell how good they are as warriors, simply because they rarely come up against skilled enemies. Gandalf across The Hobbit and LotR uses Glamdring twice against a significant opponent, killing The Great Goblin in a surprise round with a weapon designed against goblins/orcs, kilsl the balrog off-stage, and otherwise going through large numbers of ordinary orcs and goblins.

Bluenose wrote:

Test the last by giving it to everyone, and see how well it's received by people who think casters already have enough problem overcoming saves.

Your argument against buffing a weak, single target school power is... that if literally every enemy had it, they would be stronger against Wizards?

You realize that argument could be applied to almost every ability in the game? Absurd.

My argument is it should be tested rather than simply give More Power to what may or may not be a particularly weak ability - though I realise that's unpopular with people who've already decided that arguments about power level and not inflating it unnecessarily only apply to martials in 1e, and caster should get anything they ask for to power them up.

Unicore wrote:

Temperans wrote:

Unicore I agree having a +2 bonus is nice in isolation. However, looking at the whole power its just no fun. If it had at least 1 of these: Longer durarion, easier action use, no focus cost, or better range. Than the power would be fine. But as is it fails to provide any benefit.

Also, that Power was meant to replicate the Enhancement School power: An action to get a bonus to an ability score. But then the Enchantment Power scales to +6 (impossible in PF2), was capable of increases AC, and lasted for up to a minute.

So if it at least had gotten that 1 minute duration it would have made the Power a low more useable.

I think giving it a +2 and allowing it to apply to saving throws just made it too powerful to stick a duration on. If it lasted a minute, I think it would be essentially giving the Transmuter a proficiency bonus to a saving throw that they got to chose every fight. I wonder if people would like it better or worse if it could only apply to athletics or acrobatics, but lasted a minute?

What? last a minute, but to use once. +2 in 1 save is not that strong, not at all.

Test the last by giving it to everyone, and see how well it's received by people who think casters already have enough problem overcoming saves.

Martialmasters wrote:

The biggest thing about a wizard I think, and spellcasters in general, is that spells don't become really potent until mid-game. Which means you are playing a low life, low save, largely low mobility, low AC class with limited potency per day and poor action economy interaction.

By mid-game, some of the spells start getting good enough to sort of cover up these shortcomings.

Sure sounds like the age old wizard class is playing as intended to me! XD

As long as I've been alive (nearly 40 years) the wizard class has really sucked at low levels and really rocked at high levels. It's a time honored tradition.

I don't think Wizards were poor at low level since 3.x came out, but they still got the inflation in abilities that they'd previously had. Going from reasonably strong at low levels to veritable gods at high satisfied the Wizard fans. Now they go from mediocre at low level to merely very strong at high, that's a downgrade across the board.

Bluenose wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I like playing wizards, but I hate being mathematically weaker than other party members in near perpetuity.

I don't want my Ranger to be permanently inferior to the Wizard at flying, teleporting, and moving the party to another plane.Unless your idea is that a Wizard should have a whole range of abilities that a Ranger/<enter other non-caster here> can't ever get AND should be as good as them at anything they can do, then that's an issue you might want to address.

Do you not know how to build a ranger for this? You can do the superior ranger martial damage, while picking up a ton of the wizard's best defensive and transportation abilities.

Take multiclass wizard, sorcerer, or bard. Get up to Expert casting which will give you up to 6th level spells. This will get you invis and flying, which you can use to great effect because invis flat-foots anyone you shoot with your bow. Flying is a 4th level spell. You can also toss on a heroism. You get to all this for a 3 feat cost and an investment in a skill like Arcana or Occultism.

Then you can purchase fairly cheap scrolls of 4th level invis and fly to use it a lot more of than your spell slots allow. Or get a couple of 4th level wand.

So basically:

The Wizard defaults to being good at casting and mathematically inferior at combat.
The ranger defaults to being good at combat and can spend significant resources to be mathematically inferior at casting.

And you consider this situation unfair to the Wizard.

I like playing wizards, but I hate being mathematically weaker than other party members in near perpetuity.

I don't want my Ranger to be permanently inferior to the Wizard at flying, teleporting, and moving the party to another plane.Unless your idea is that a Wizard should have a whole range of abilities that a Ranger/<enter other non-caster here> can't ever get AND should be as good as them at anything they can do, then that's an issue you might want to address.

At least we're not getting those silly world shattering story events every ten years like many other systems do to try and gloss over the changes. It gets really stupid after the 2nd or 3rd such event.

Not really relevant to this thread, but naming any system other than D&D that does this is going to be difficult.

Wizards being overpowered last edition is potentially evidence that...

...the people playing Wizards in both this and the last edition might have inflated expectations of what a Wizard should be able to do and are upset that they aren't doing it.

I mean people have pointed out why Wizards feel pretty horrible to play. It isn't because they are invalid or bad, it's that they are boring.

The biggest shame is most of the things that make them look unique or interesting to play are exceedingly high level feats.

Combo magic for example.

Well here's the challenge, write something that makes them "interesting" without it being a power-up.

I admit that the effects of arcane thesis features can fall into the "mechanically potent, but boring" realm since they boil down to "have more feats" or "have a different number of spells per day" - but that doesn't make them actually bad

If "Mechanically boring but potent" was seen as a problem, PF1 wouldn't have had so many threads where some people insisted Fighters were fine because their numbers were big.

D4 is basically a gamified caltrop.

Only if you keep the points sharpened, which means you can't roll them too often. But who likes rolling d4 anyway?

You can (or could) get sets of dice that are pencil-like, I've got a set with a d4 (eight faces, 1 to 4 repeated), d6 (six faces), d8 (eight faces) and d10 percentile (ten faces, one has number 0 to 90, the other 1 to 19). I've always liked them.

I haven't played with Classic Fantasy enough to say. We only played one session to try the rules out. It's not that we wouldn't play again, but we play a lot of different games and this hasn't come up again. I think it would convert more easily, but I've no experience with how it handles high-powered characters. It does work well for dungeon-crawling and if that's a big part of Odyysey of the Dragonlords then that would be the one to go with. Reading Classic fantasy reviews it seems more "high fantasy" than core Mythras, and my impression was similar.

Not that specifically (for one thing it seems very like the Thennla setting for Mythras) but I've done some other D&D material for various D100 games. In my experience, modules written for the level range 3-10 work best, and settings which have a lot of characters above that range are not easy to convert. While starting Runequest characters are generally more capable than 1st level characters, they don't advance as fast or reach such high power levels (unless you go into heroquesting, when the bets are off). Supposedly TDM have someone working on a Mythic Greece book for their Mythic Earth series, which sounds like it would be an even better fit.
As a caveat, if the players are used to and like the power and versatility of D&D-style magic then they'll probably be disappointed about the way it works in a D100 system. No priesthood has the breadth of a Cleric, and sorcery doesn't have the breadth of arcane magic, and the fact that casting is a skill rather than automatic has also disappointed people I've introduced who had a background in 5e.

Also, I think the kind of PC game that would work best with 2e rules is not entirely the kind of PC game that people expect from an adaptation of a tabletop game.

Personally, I maintain that the "ideal" 2e PC game would have turn-based tactical combat in the vein of XCom.

That's what Larian Studios did - and are doing with Baldur's Gate 3 - with their Divinity: Original Sin games. Very good games they are too, though the lack of classes and levels needs some adaptation for a D&D/PF derivative and that's one thing that makes me slightly cautious about BG3.

Zapp wrote:

Have y'all heard of a game called "D&D 5th edition"? It actually fixes this problem. It was also published four years before Pathfinder 2, so Paizo has no excuse for reverting to the old bad pre-5E days of LFQW.

Does it? I'm not at all sure that's the consensus on 5E. I've certainly heard people having martial/caster disparity issues in that game.

It's only a little worse than 2e AD&D, in practice. Of course people have complained about caster/martial disparity issues since the days I began playing in the 1970s and most editions have increased them.

Of course there have also been plenty of people insisting that you shouldn't care how powerful your character is, you should play your character concept, and any balance issues are up to the GM to sort out at the table. I wonder why they never seem to intervene in these threads complaining about casters (generally Wizards) being underpowered?

There's also going to be less money around for recreational activities in general. That's going to eliminate a number of stores too.

I don't see it hurting WotC too much, as their books are available in a huge range of stores apart from hobby shops. It won't matter to the small publishers who sell PDFs or PoD via DriveThru - in fact they might see pretty good business while a lockdown is in place, as it's the place to get products. It's the companies in-between that are big enough to have printed material in a FLGS, but not at the level where their products get into mainstream stores, that might hurt. Direct sales and PDFs are going to be their saviour, if they survive. Perhaps Kickstarter too, for the ones that use that, since it's another source of income. Some are not going to make it.

I am of the mind that actions have consequences. A caster spending all of their spells on 1 fight wont get sympathy from me when another fight breaks out. Similarly, a martial character that goes too deep cant complain if the enemies gang up on them.

This generates two sorts of encounter/situation. Ones where they need spells (or at least magic) to resolve them, where the spellcasters automatically are more important than the non-spellcasters; and ones where it's not necessary to use spells and party composition is only relevant in that spellcasters don't need to use their main abilities. If PF2 has moved away from the situation where some characters are effectively makeweights for large parts of the game, I don't think that's too bad.

Going for a real world setting where the players a people who died, went to Hell, and came back when the barrier got weak and upon arrival back it turns out they have become demonic in nature with powers reflecting their torment in Hell.

Not really something I see Fate, FAE or BRP doing well. I'd expect GURPS to have some way to handle it, but not necessarily in the core rules. That would leave HERO System - Champions, specifically - or Heroquest. The first is very good for putting together self-designed suites of powers under point-buy. The second would work with a keyword tied to the power(s) that the character had, and allowing them to advance it before play to a fairly high level.

There are a lot. At the high end of the complexity scale you've got GURPS (highly simulationist) and HERO system (very toolkit). Intermediate complexity would include Fate (quite narrative) and Chaosium's BRP (more simulationist). At the low complexity end Fate Accelerated and Heroquest (2nd edition, or Heroquest Glorantha, are the best versions). There are also games using the same/similar systems for different titles, such as the PDQ system, the various ones derived from BRP (including Call of Cthulhu and Runequest), or several D20 System games.
Which I'd recommend depends on what exactly you want to do, as they've got different strengths and weaknesses. Gurps and BRP wouldn't be my choice for a superheroes game, but Hero and Fate manage that well. Fate Accelerated and Heroquest wouldn't be good choices if you want to know How you arrive at the result of an action - they're both quite abstract. Heroquest gets an astonishing level of character customisation by making abilities very abstract and task resolution lacking in detail. It's hard to recommend any particular one for all situations.

Thanks Gorbacz!

Does anyone perchance know if/when Starfinder will be back on the list?

FFG's Star Wars is the regular from the Top Five that might disappear - it rather depends what's going to happen to the RPG division, as it might continue as it is but with a different logo. It's had a spot in the list consistently for years, along with D&D and PF. That only leaves two spaces for other games, and there's usually some new editions of big name games coming out in any particular 'quarter'. I don't think Starfinder's sales now that it's out of the 'New Shiny' phase are going to beat any of the big three (D&D, PF, and SW which are already ahead) and I don't see it beating something like The One Ring 2e or other big and previously popular games in the period when they're released. So it's chances depend mostly on something happening to Star Wars, leaving just D&D and PF as regulars, and taking over SW spot as the popular science fantasy game in the top five.

Quote:

no, it is not. Mystara and Greyhawk are generic fantasy. Forgotten Realms is the cool parts of other settings stolen and stitched together and masquerading as generic fantasy.

Ed Greenwood stole bits of fantasy settings that weren't professionally published until the start of the 1980s when he created the setting in the late 1960s?

Greenwood is a time-traveller?

I think the argument would be that there are bits of Tolkein, bits of De Camp, bits of Malory, bits of Leiber, bits of 1001 Nights and bits of other well-known fantasy writings all stuck together in Forgotten Realms and for that matter in Mystara and Greyhawk. Which is pretty much "D&D-style Fantasy", yo be honest, which mixes and matches things the designer(s) think are fun without much regard for context.

So, this is what Divinity looks like! Because it sure as hell doesnt look like baldur's gate.

If you want something that looks more like BG/Infinity Engine, Pillars of Eternity is where to go lately.

Is there a game in this genre that isn't fiddly in some way?

If the genre you're thinking of is "D&D-fantasy", probably not, and I'd include the OSR in that. If it's more general "Fantasy RPG", most can reasonably considered less 'fiddly'. There might be complicated segments such as character creation (hello, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy when you don't want to use any of the archetypes) but the actual play is unlikely to include so many things to keep track of.

MaxAstro wrote:

You are missing my point entirely, which is that "moderate" is a broad and almost inaccurate range.

Even with a fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric party, a level 3 monster is going to be quite challenging for a level 1 party. Meanwhile, two level 1 monsters, despite being the same "difficulty", will be much easier for that same party.

A level 3 single monster is only barely moderate, so it's no surprise at all that it jumps up to "severe" against a slightly below-average party composition. Going from there to "this party composition is completely non-feasible" is a heck of a stretch.

Especially when the crux of your argument is "the warpriest will go down in one round" and the thing that single high level monsters are absolutely best at is focusing down a single party member. Yes, of course the warpriest has a good chance of going down in one round. A barbarian has a fair chance of going down in one round against that encounter. Level+2 encounters are brutal, no matter the game only calls them "moderate".

If the Bugbear was attacking a Fighter, Champion or Monk, it would put him to 1/3 hps on average. Even against a Ranger, Barbarian or a martial with no maximized AC or 10 Constitution, it would put him at 1/4 hps. So, without critical hits or any kind of luck, the situation is easily manageable.

Compare the iconics and they don't really come out hugely better. Sajan has 19hp and 19 AC (best AC at level-1), Seelah has 20hp and 17 AC, Valeros has 20hp and 18AC, Harsk and Amiri both are 22hp and 18AC. None of that suggest they're going to survive much more easily - I suspect Seelah is likely to be down after one round too, and the rest aren't exactly doing well.

The-Magic-Sword wrote:

I sort of interpret that as character growth, if you start out with Power Attack and later retrain to Exacting Strike when it starts to fall off, it doesn't mean the character forgot the maunever, it means they've changed their fighting style and don't practice the original move anymore.

Maybe the elf no longer wants to specialize in the elven curve blade, so they replace the ancestry feat, does it matter? Maybe a magical power they had goes dormant and they pick up something else. Maybe their magical powers move on so they stop practicing inefficient magic and replace those spells with something better suited to their developing magic.

Except that per the rules you don't just not use whatever after you've retrained, you don't remember how to use it.

It's a game, so in a sense none of it matters. Still, a lot of the abstractions in Pathfinder feel a bit... I don't know, uncomfortable to me.

Do you remember how to do calculus the way you did when you learnt it at school? I don't. I do remember the statistics and probability that I learnt at the same time because I've kept using them (for work and hobbies). Of course that's after several decades, maybe it would be different it was only a few months. On the other hand, I remember at least one physical skill I was good at that I stopped practicing for nine months and found really hard when I went back to doing it - and plenty of people will have experience learning how to walk again after an accident that injures their legs. It's not enough to remember intellectually how to do a physical skill, if you aren't practicing it then you won't be good and certainly not likely to perform reliably under stress.

Gorbacz wrote:

393 ratings at Amazon!

The 8% of 1-star reviews ratio somebody did brandish earlier as a proof that something is very amiss with the game and needs some urgent housrules to be workable has fallen to 5% over the course of last few weeks - like I said, backlash "YOU'VE BETRAYED MY PRECIOUS FEELINGS" reviews are drying up. Of course it will take some time to reach PF1's average rating and % of 1-stars but ... it's getting there.

Maybe I'll do a countdown to 400 if it makes enough people ang happy.

That's a pretty impressive change in percentage, because it means most of the incoming reviews from Christmas were not 1 star reviews (as the number of reviews nearly doubled, but the percentage almost halved).

Exciting stuff!

And I'll toss a vote out there for the countdown to 400, your updates are the biggest reason I keep refreshing the thread.

There have been forty reviews since the last 1* one (that was early in November), which accounts for the change.

I must admit as a librarian I find the number of people complaining about case binding and thinking it's fragile to be amusing. They seem to expect perfect binding, which is far worse.

Mythic GM Emulator might be useful for campaign purposes, and a google search for "Random Dungeon Generator Pathfinder" turns up several - mostly for PF1 though.

This thread reminds me of the immediate aftermath of Starfinder's release when people would declare Soldiers and Envoys tier H/12 trashcan material and Operatives as tier S+++ godlike, based mostly on armchair rocking and "40 years of experience in playing games"

Stating that now in Stafinder forum would get people to laugh and raise their eyebrows, as actual gameplay proved Soldier damage output as more consistent and reliable than Operatives and Envoy's buffs and debuffs indispensable.

Or the common opinion early in D&D 3rd edition reviews that the Monk was overpowered. Less often, the Sorcerer made the Wizard obsolete. And of course a little later the Mystic Theurge was the God-tier prestige class which everyone will want. Funny how those worked out.

Now, if the same complaints are still being made after a year or two, that's when they start to sound plausible. See the Caster/Martial Disparity for more than a decades worth of examples.

For those complaining that two weapon fighting is too hard, I recommend trying it yourself, it's not as easy as the movies make it seem.

It turns out, actual weapons are heavy.

Fighting is hard, period. You can compare the professional warrior class' training in medieval Europe, Japan, China, etc with the modern sports professional who's been training since they were ten (or less). Those thousands of hours of training matter.

ChibiNyan wrote:

Well, all I know is that form my GMing, casters throwing stuff at boss enemies pretty much always results in a succesful save, which sometimes still has some okay effect, but in their minds all they see is "All my spells failed, I wasted my slots."

Casters are new players to the hobby, I'm not gonna be like "It's still good because of all this math". I'd rather spells actually landed. Doesn't help that in AoA, most fights seem to be vs few or 1 big enemy.

Psychologically, I agree that it's more fun for ALL the classes players to be able to hit and have an appreciable effect. I think it would feel like a better game if the casters could actually hit or succeed at the save spells more often. Similarly, if the Fighter missed 75-80% of his attacks but still did a tiny bit of damage on a miss they too would feel something was wrong with the game's math system. Saying "Ok, you missed again this round, but you still did 2 points of damage, you are slowly whittling him down!" wouldn't help much.

If the Fighter's successful attacks were doing much more than 'slowly whittling <the enemy> down' then it'd be a lot easier to justify high success rates for casters whose best effects are considerably more significant than a little attrition.

Quark Blast wrote:

I still don't understand the V:tM attraction. It's been a Top 5 contender for a long time and not only have I never played, I don't know anyone who has and have only heard of one person that did about 5 years ago now, maybe longer.

PF is obviously PF2 and it surprises me that SF dropped out of the Top 5 but then, as mentioned, I don't understand V:tM's placement so what do I know?

Be interesting to see if SW moves up with the 4th quarter returns.

Masquerade is in contention because it’s 5th Edition came out at the end of 18, and two major release supplements came out in 19 - one during the summer. There was also a major Kickstarter for a beloved supplement’s redesign over the summer that brought renewed attention.

The game had been dormant for a long time (White Wolf stopped publishing it in 04, replacing it with Vampire: The Requiem and left the game unsupported until 2011 when they released a Masquerade 20th Anniversary edition.)

While you may not have personally met anyone who played it, there is still a huge fan base. Remember, before Paizo managed to topple D&D from the top of the sales chart the only other company to have done so for any real period of time was White Wolf

Also, and this should not be neglected, Geek & Sundry have been running a Vampire game for just over a year now. I don't think there's any doubt that their games (and other major streamers) influence buying habits.

Shadowrun, the other game that's not a regular on the list, also had a new edition (it's 6th) in August. I don't expect it to sustain 3rd place, although it might manage to stay reasonably high (Top-10 rather than Top-5, alongside some other regulars).

But the truth was the mechanics had reached the end of the cycle. There was just so much you could do with a twenty year old game chassis. And new gamers just weren't coming in fast enough.

Plenty of games don't see the same large changes from edition to edition that have been happening with D&D since 2000, and have been going for a lot more than twenty years while still finding interesting new products to sell. The idea you need to change the system so it can do more is a very 'D&D' phenomenon. It might be a necessary one for a business strategy committed to a high churn on splats, but D&D 5e has shown that's not a necessary feature even for D&D-a-like.

Like the Star Wars RPG pops up there whenever there's a Star Wars movie on the horizon.

It's pretty much a constant on the list. 5e is the big item, PF was usually second, then you'd get some 'Hot New Thing' (sometimes more than one) or 'Latest G&S Game' fighting for 3rd place with FFG Star Wars. As those New/Latest items lose some of the shiny they drop away but Star Wars has stayed in/around for years.

And there are one or two companies who put out sales numbers. We're about due for Evil Hat's yearly report which lists sales for all their items, for instance.

Ediwir wrote:

Same. With no changes to the lore between edition, Golarion still uses the same solar system. One star.

I think even trinary star systems are pretty rare, I don't know if five is even astronomically possible?

I think the record is seven - AR Cassiopeiae and Nu Scorpii. Iota Cassiopeia is a quint, two binaries and a single.

Squiggit wrote:

My problem with this suggestion is that it kind of 'solves' action economy too much.

I agreed with your broader point as well, but I think this is key concept. Pushing for 100% balance everywhere, "solving" issues as it were, actually doesn't lead to interesting game. The small imbalances and assymetries are perfect foundations to build other mechanics upon, since the preceding "weakness" helps moderate the new mechanic from being too powerful. If everything was tightly locked down in balance, there would be less freedom to expand and innovate.

Congratulations, the Wizard is now the weak class and that push for "perfect balance" has failed. Enjoy your "small imbalances".

Note: some people will be less enthusiastic about the benefits of imbalance when it's the class they like that's the weak one. Persuading them is your job.

Bluenose wrote:

Bandw2 wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

It's sort of interesting to me how there aren't similar complaints about how much worse archery is relative to other options compared to PF1.

Since archery was the king of DPR strategies in PF1, since not only could you get a full attack off wherever, but you could get a lot of shots off in a given round with pretty good accuracy, and stack up a lot of static bonuses.

But now static damage bonuses are gone for the most part, nobody gets more than 3 attacks off, and the -10 attack isn't that valuable so you're no longer at a severe advantage compared to "run up and whack them" as a combat strategy.

Archery had a similar damping down to spellcasting, but doesn't seem nearly as controversial.

like, with what my theory is, that people aren't actually complaining about being weak, but being boring or static, this isn't a surprise.

Propose a solution that makes the Wizard more interesting without also making them more powerful. I'm sure the people complaining about casters being underpowered will take it up enthusiastically.

that not the point >_>

Maybe not, but your suggestion that people aren't complaining about being weak but being boring or static seems pretty conclusively disproved by all the proposals to make playing wizards fun again by giving them more power.

Bluenose wrote:

Propose a solution that makes the Wizard more interesting without also making them more powerful. I'm sure the people complaining about casters being underpowered will take it up enthusiastically.

People have and... people have? On both points. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here.

It's funny how the threads about underpowered casters pop up and go on for pages every week then. All that's needed to end them is for that solution to be posted and they should stop.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

It's sort of interesting to me how there aren't similar complaints about how much worse archery is relative to other options compared to PF1.

Since archery was the king of DPR strategies in PF1, since not only could you get a full attack off wherever, but you could get a lot of shots off in a given round with pretty good accuracy, and stack up a lot of static bonuses.

But now static damage bonuses are gone for the most part, nobody gets more than 3 attacks off, and the -10 attack isn't that valuable so you're no longer at a severe advantage compared to "run up and whack them" as a combat strategy.

Archery had a similar damping down to spellcasting, but doesn't seem nearly as controversial.

like, with what my theory is, that people aren't actually complaining about being weak, but being boring or static, this isn't a surprise.

Propose a solution that makes the Wizard more interesting without also making them more powerful. I'm sure the people complaining about casters being underpowered will take it up enthusiastically.