ThePuppyTurtle's page

My prediction that Paizo would funnel all of its settings into one GURPS-esque system is coming true.

Given that PF2 is basically the cornerstone of ORC, it being suited to a wide variety of genres is exciting. Way yoo soon to count the chickens, but if this goes really, really, really well, it could be the beginning of a golden age.

Interesting that voicing inpopular opinions brings out the vultures.

As good as the moderators are at filtering overt abuse, there's something to be said about the subtle smugness that can fester on these forums, especially when the conversation features a lot of regular posters versus just a few people. For a place that autocensors profanity, these forums can be surprisingly toxic at times. I suppose it's the homefield advantage that emboldens people siding with the company and defending its decisions to engage in a lot of condescension and smarm.

(Granted, it could easily be a lot worse, and I recognize the hard work and reasonable impartiality of the moderators in keeping it as good as it is.)

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

YuriP wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

However, I still think people are reasonably annoyed by what has turned out to be SF1's relatively short lifespan. 3.0 and its successors represented a unique situation where what was basically a single system was playable and actively worked on by either WotC or Paizo for more than twenty years. A lot of us who came into the hobby during that period aren't used to edition changes being an inescapable reality.

I agree but you know this was an exception and that normally a TTRPG system doesn't survive for so long time without a new edition.

Right, but the reason this situation is so uncommon is corporate sleaze. All your TTRPG books become outdated after five years for the same reason your phone is deliberately designed to break after two years. No product can ever be allowed to endure in its usefulness because that would eliminate the need to buy another one.

Your analysis of Paizo's motives later in your comment gives them a lot of benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possible they've simply realized that the edition treadmill is a way to maximize profits at the expense of the consumer, and have decided they'll switch to it now because it will make them more money. That's why everyone else does it. How likely is it, really, that Paizo is a special exception?

Edition changes come with unacceptable financial risk due to higher investment costs if the goal is just to ensure people repurchase books. Especially when players can still play with old books and the material is freely available online.

The financial incentive is instead to gather a new audience. The PF2e playerbase is massive relative to the SF playerbase and thus can provide an influx of new players.

You're probably right that PF2 being more popular than SF1 is a significant influence on this decision (to say nothing of the OGL crisis which I think it's fair to say is the cause of it here), but, regarding the industry more broadly, do you really expect me to believe every TTRPG publisher just happens to have non-cynical reasons to massively inconvenience their entire consumer-base every 5 years in a way that just happens to make them more money?

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

An increase in sales wouldn't exactly go against the point that frequent edition changes are a sleazy business practice. Sleazy business practices generally persist because they increase sales.

I don't think that change an edition with new rules for any reason is a Sleazy business.

Any TTRPG that receives a lot of expansion books over the time becomes clunky, exploited and lagged and the demand to clear everything see whats was good, what was bad, what was ugly with new ideas to develop a new game comes naturally.

In case of SF1 probably this comes a bit earlier due the OGL crisis made the Paizo review many of their products, how to adapt them to a new license and during this process see if there's nothing deserving to be improved and one of these this was SF where the decided that is better to just update it to use the same rule system of PF2.

IMO this probably made the SF2 happen in about 2 years earlier but it was almost certain that they will do this change soon or later.

The problem of complains that I usually see here comes basically from 2 publics. Those who didn't like how PF2 is and stays in SF1 that uses a similar ruleset of PF1 and still receives updates. And those who don't like changes at all.
These people know that for homebrew games SF1 will still be there and just won't receive new updates but also know that this kind of support abandon will make the game slowly loosing interest and dying. That's why whenever you have a change like this, there's an end of world complain, especially if it goes in a direction that something that already exists and that you know will probably work out very well.

I agree that edition changes are not inherently sleazy. I think most edition changes are annoying cash-grabs and basically the RPG equivalent of manufactured obsolescence, but the OGL crisis is absolutely a unique situation and I agree that we should view this edition change more charitably than that.

However, I still think people are reasonably annoyed by what has turned out to be SF1's relatively short lifespan. 3.0 and its successors represented a unique situation where what was basically a single system was playable and actively worked on by either WotC or Paizo for more than twenty years. A lot of us who came into the hobby during that period aren't used to edition changes being an inescapable reality.

Time will tell whether this edition change is a situational result of the OGL crisis or the start of a new precedent where all our books are now going to be rendered obsolete by edition changes within a decade of buying them, something Paizo used to be above. Hopefully, this combined PF2.5/SF2.0 thing Paizo is creating will last as long or longer, but maybe not, and if not, that's a shame, because for a while there it was possible to have your books continue to be part of a living system for a long time after you buy them.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

TOZ wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

I'm just trying to help people like you and TOZ understand why the people reacting negatively to this have a reasonable perspective and aren't just a bunch of haters whining because of change.

I don't give a damn about their perspective, I give a damn about how they express it.

You're welcome to your feelings, but you will be accountable for how you act on them.

This response confuses me. What actions are you even talking about? All anyone has done is post their opinion on the forums, and no one in this thread seems to have been especially rude. What is it that anyone needs to be held accountable for?

I don't know, but maybe his alt was the account that offered to share his campaign plans with Paizo so that their SF2 setting didn't go astray and conflict it. Lots of megalomania and delusions of significance running around on the internet these days.

You can view the previous posts made by any given alias by clicking on their name and navigating to "posts." No post matching your description seems to have been made by "TriOmegaZero," "TOZ," or "Starfinder TOZ." While he does have a bunch of other aliases I did not look through, I suspect he did not say such a thing, and you are simply thinking of someone else.

(Also, my impression of TOZ is that he's a basically rational person, despite his status as a very devoted Paizo fan giving him a pro-company bias. I don't think it would be in-character for him to say something ridiculous like that.)

That said, if you can find where someone made a post like that, please share it with me, as that sounds hilarious.

I'm actually insulted by TOZ being presented as the model of unpaid Paizo shill and not me. I demand an apology. How do you contact the moderators around here?

I mentioned him because he was the person I was responding to in the comment that WatersLethe had initially replied to. Rest assured that it is my desire that everyone, shill, contrarian, and in-between (I like to think I'm in-between), be empathetic and engage in healthy perspective-taking when discussing these things.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

I'm just trying to help people like you and TOZ understand why the people reacting negatively to this have a reasonable perspective and aren't just a bunch of haters whining because of change.

I don't give a damn about their perspective, I give a damn about how they express it.

You're welcome to your feelings, but you will be accountable for how you act on them.

This response confuses me. What actions are you even talking about? All anyone has done is post their opinion on the forums, and no one in this thread seems to have been especially rude. What is it that anyone needs to be held accountable for?

Redgar's ACG Characters wrote:

WatersLethe wrote:

The ratio of people who bounce off of PF2 because of its rules is incredibly lower than the ratio who bounced off of SF1 because of its rules. All your subjective complaints about PF2 pale in the face of this inexorable truth.

Got stats to back that up?

Nope, nor do I think anyone has those stats. In 3 years when the population of Starfinder players triples I'll rest my case.

An increase in sales wouldn't exactly go against the point that frequent edition changes are a sleazy business practice. Sleazy business practices generally persist because they increase sales.

That said, their newfound compatibility is probably going to make SF and PF players blur together in a way that would make that comparison meaningless. Starfinder is effectively being made into a subsystem within Pathfinder rather than its own game. This will result in a lot of people who don't otherwise play SF dipping into it for content for their PF games. This will likely increase sales in a way that will not translate into actual SF play. (To be clear, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The compatibility is almost certainly going to be the best thing about SF2, and I look forward to liberally mixing them in precisely the way I'm describing, but this also happens to mean that you won't be able to assume everyone who buys SF2 books actually plays or runs SF2.)

It is possible that all of this will go really well and we will enter a decade-long golden age of a popular and well-managed -Finder 2e engine populated by multiple fun and mutually compatible games. I hope that happens, and I think it's plausible that it will happen. I'm not trying to say this is some devilish betrayal. I'm just trying to help people like you and TOZ understand why the people reacting negatively to this have a reasonable perspective and aren't just a bunch of haters whining because of change.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

A few options:

1: Covertly state what became of the drow by noting the occurrence of a large disaster that wink may have eliminated entire species from the Darklands wink.

2: Avoid stating anything that fully precludes the hypothetical possibility of drow having once existed as described. Is there any published material explicitly stating that beholders never existed in the Darklands? Is there any Starfinder material explicitly stating that there's no such thing as a jedi?...

Well, let's look at these!

1. I think this could potentially and totally work! ...But I'm not a lawyer. Nor do I have a legal team advising me, which Paizo (I assume) does. Here's the thing, even if this a battle that Paizo could win legally, just having the possibility that Hasbro could come in and bury them in legal fees is daunting. Then we can tack on the "do we want to address in lore this catacylsm/disaster that was apparently only based on ancestry?" It soon becomes a problem of "we have created a new piece of lore/history, but one we cannot elaborate much on." Could it work? Probably. Did Paizo feel like that was safe to do? Looks like they do not.

2. This is what is being done, in essence. The problem that you're seeing is that the spaces that were occupied by drow are now going to be occupied by something else. We go back to the "we can't flesh out/use/write stories with that area if we obliquelty talk around drow." Drow are not being written about going forward, but other things are and those are the stories that are going to be told - not the absence of a story.

1: I guess I'm more of a cynic than you, but I don't take it for granted that paizo thought of and consciously rejected every alternative to what they did, nor do I take it for granted that, If they did think of and reject it, they did so exclusively for sympathetic reasons. I don't consider it noble or sympathetic for them to make themselves 100% litigation proof with an annoying retcon if they had the option to make themselves 99% litigation proof without one. I regard that as a predictable-from-a-corporation but still objectively bad compromise of artistic integrity.

2: There are ways of occupying those spaces without precluding the idea that drow occupied them ten years prior. This would place a minor restriction on what stories they could tell, but I think preserving the pretense that this is all one cohesive universe would be worth that cost.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Unicore wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Ruzza wrote:

The continuity and lore that many are saying should be maintained and respected is a problem that some are overlooking. If you want to continue to use a portion of the Darklands or anything that used the drow in any respect, you would legally need to not give mention to them in any way. Two of the major options thus became:

1. Drop several Darklands locations and stories entirely, never to be revisted.

2. State that drow did not exist there.

Like, absolutely it sucks. James Jacobs himself had said that. But if you're looking for a justification, they cannot give it in the text of ORC products or you make a connection between OGL Golarion and ORC Golarion that puts you at risk legally.

You don't have to say they were never there. You can just not say they were ever there.

In official ORC published material, they never will say "The Drow were never here."

On the contrary, isn't this exactly what they said they would do by reframing the idea of drow as an in-universe lie?

To the best of my knowledge,this explanation will not be appearing in published material.

Out of curiosity, what would you like the outcome to be? Many people, Paizo include, have stated that they cannot overtly state the reason for what will become of drow for legal reasons. I understand wanting to voice your displeasure, but many are disappointed while still seeing that this is a necessary precaution.

A few options:

1: Covertly state what became of the drow by noting the occurrence of a large disaster that wink may have eliminated entire species from the Darklands wink.

2: Avoid stating anything that fully precludes the hypothetical possibility of drow having once existed as described. Is there any published material explicitly stating that beholders never existed in the Darklands? Is there any Starfinder material explicitly stating that there's no such thing as a jedi? Not that I know of. No one thinks this creates a legal problem.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Ruzza wrote:

The continuity and lore that many are saying should be maintained and respected is a problem that some are overlooking. If you want to continue to use a portion of the Darklands or anything that used the drow in any respect, you would legally need to not give mention to them in any way. Two of the major options thus became:

1. Drop several Darklands locations and stories entirely, never to be revisted.

2. State that drow did not exist there.

Like, absolutely it sucks. James Jacobs himself had said that. But if you're looking for a justification, they cannot give it in the text of ORC products or you make a connection between OGL Golarion and ORC Golarion that puts you at risk legally.

You don't have to say they were never there. You can just not say they were ever there.

In official ORC published material, they never will say "The Drow were never here."

On the contrary, isn't this exactly what they said they would do by reframing the idea of drow as an in-universe lie? In fact, isn't that more legally dangerous than just never mentioning them again at all?

The continuity and lore that many are saying should be maintained and respected is a problem that some are overlooking. If you want to continue to use a portion of the Darklands or anything that used the drow in any respect, you would legally need to not give mention to them in any way. Two of the major options thus became:

1. Drop several Darklands locations and stories entirely, never to be revisted.

2. State that drow did not exist there.

Like, absolutely it sucks. James Jacobs himself had said that. But if you're looking for a justification, they cannot give it in the text of ORC products or you make a connection between OGL Golarion and ORC Golarion that puts you at risk legally.

You don't have to say they were never there. You can just not say they were ever there. There is also no published material explicitly stating that the daevites do not exist on Golarion. This does not In any way leave the door open for someone to claim in a court of law that they're somehow canon in a way that is legally dangerous.

Rysky wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

If you remove everything about the Drow that makes them recognizable as Drow would the people in here fighting over them even want them?

Yes. I would. My beef is not with The removal of the drow has such, It is with the explicit and retroactive nature of that removal. I would have preferred that the matter just not be acknowledged rather than acknowledged in a way that explicitly purges 7% of existing material from continuity.

… so which is it?

Please elaborate on the contradiction you perceive.

If they’re never acknowledged again and the areas they are in are given to new creatures without comment when those areas are touched upon, what’s the difference?

“Never existed in the first place” and “we’re never going to mention or acknowledge them again”, what’s the difference?

I see one minor difference. The second case allows a GM with an existing history to fill in the blanks (i.e., the dark elves losing a major, genocidal, subterranean war.)

This here is the thing that I am saying they should have done.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

If you remove everything about the Drow that makes them recognizable as Drow would the people in here fighting over them even want them?

Yes. I would. My beef is not with The removal of the drow has such, It is with the explicit and retroactive nature of that removal. I would have preferred that the matter just not be acknowledged rather than acknowledged in a way that explicitly purges 7% of existing material from continuity.

… so which is it?

Please elaborate on the contradiction you perceive.

If they’re never acknowledged again and the areas they are in are given to new creatures without comment when those areas are touched upon, what’s the difference?

“Never existed in the first place” and “we’re never going to mention or acknowledge them again”, what’s the difference?

Paizo isn’t abandoning the Darklands, they still want to tell stories there.

You don't have to abandon the entire darklands to talk around the specific locations that should definitely have drow in them. If for some reason you had to revisit those locations, just insinuate that something about them recently changed rather than canonizing a new, mutually exclusive version of them that overtly denies what was once there.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Unicore wrote:

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

If you remove everything about the Drow that makes them recognizable as Drow would the people in here fighting over them even want them?

Yes. I would. My beef is not with The removal of the drow has such, It is with the explicit and retroactive nature of that removal. I would have preferred that the matter just not be acknowledged rather than acknowledged in a way that explicitly purges 7% of existing material from continuity.

James Jacobs told us he has plans for overwriting some setting locations that have been written about previously, probably in some up coming adventure paths.

This, right here, is the specific thing I do not like. Everyone on your side of the debate has been arguing that the drow always a minor element of the setting. If that's true, why is it necessary to explicitly purge them--and with them, everyone's Second Darkness & Shattered Star playthroughs--from continuity rather than just leaving them unmentioned from now on?

Shattered star was the first a p I ever ran, and the fact that acknowledging its events in other adventures at my table now creates an explicit continuity error is what bothers me.

Replacing the drow with something else would not cause the same problem because it merely alters the events of Shattered Star rather than deleting them.

I have not read Shattered Star. If the drows there were replaced by Cavern Elves, how bad would it be ? What would be missing ?

Maybe there were some Cavern Elves demon cultists with delusions of grandeur about having a whole empire of matriarchal houses and who called themselves drows.

This can perfectly happen in a home game.

It's just that Paizo cannot write it in one of their future products.

This would be fine. This is the exact thing I'm saying they should have done.

But they're NOT purging them, they're just not saying anything about them going forward.

The big thing is Zirnakaynin, and all they're saying is it's now empty and the Sekmin fear it. They're very pointedly not saying HOW it got empty or what the Sekmin are so scared of.

On the contrary, aren't they explicitly saying that it was always empty, rather than just that it has come to be empty now?

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Rysky wrote:

If you remove everything about the Drow that makes them recognizable as Drow would the people in here fighting over them even want them?

Yes. I would. My beef is not with The removal of the drow has such, It is with the explicit and retroactive nature of that removal. I would have preferred that the matter just not be acknowledged rather than acknowledged in a way that explicitly purges 7% of existing material from continuity.

James Jacobs told us he has plans for overwriting some setting locations that have been written about previously, probably in some up coming adventure paths.

This, right here, is the specific thing I do not like. Everyone on your side of the debate has been arguing that the drow always a minor element of the setting. If that's true, why is it necessary to explicitly purge them--and with them, everyone's Second Darkness & Shattered Star playthroughs--from continuity rather than just leaving them unmentioned from now on?

Shattered star was the first a p I ever ran, and the fact that acknowledging its events in other adventures at my table now creates an explicit continuity error is what bothers me.

Replacing the drow with something else would not cause the same problem because it merely alters the events of Shattered Star rather than deleting them.

If you remove everything about the Drow that makes them recognizable as Drow would the people in here fighting over them even want them?

Yes. I would. My beef is not with The removal of the drow has such, It is with the explicit and retroactive nature of that removal. I would have preferred that the matter just not be acknowledged rather than acknowledged in a way that explicitly purges 7% of existing material from continuity.

I mean, the reason Starfinder can do things with their Dark Elves but Pathfinder can't is that Starfinder put in the work to make the argument "these Dark Elves are different from the Dark Elves you know and recognize" - they run a corporation; they are about profit; they will cheat, steal, and kill because of the culture of the corporation rather than their religion or whatever; their religion is the corporation!

Whereas Pathfinder itself tried to go back and say "these Dark Elves are *like* the Dark Elves you know and love" (this was the point of Second Darkness) and only started to move in the other direction recently.

It's not like Pathfinder 2e going forward isn't going to have subterranean elves, they're just not cruel and up to no good like the Drow were. That's the difference they've carved out- the Cavern Elves are generally not villainous culturally unlike the Drow.

Is there actual confirmation of this or is this just speculation? My understanding was that replacing the drow was exactly what they had decided not to do, hence the retcon deleting them rather than altering them.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

They could have treated them like Folca and just not acknowledged them going forward, leaving the door open for people to employ their own headcanons. They've specifically chosen to deny us that freedom.

deny us that freedom? Really?

Here's what the Creative Director of Paizo said about that.

James Jacobs wrote:

As for how well handle canon going forward from previous drow-adjacent stories... we will be handling those when (and if) we do new stories that build off of that content. The stories we've already published, be they old (like Second Darkness) or relatively new (like Abomination Vaults) aren't going anywhere; the OGL remains, after all. We just aren't going into an OGL future.

Which of your freedoms does that deny?

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

Now that they've done that once, who's to say they're not going to do it every time something they previously wrote becomes inconvenient?

But no one is taking away your head canon. No one is even taking away the previously published material.

Obviously, the creators of a universe can make changes to that universe. That's a risk you take when you steep yourself in the lore of someone else's universe.

But if that's what is keeping you up at night, then there's not much anyone can do to manage that anxiety for you.

Let me elaborate on the Folca example I used.

Folca, we have been assured, is never going to be mentioned in published material again, and, because explaining his disappearance would require mentioning him, we will never be told why. Those of us who are invested enough in the setting to care can make up a story on our own to explain what happened. I, personally, like to imagine that Andoletta killed him. While this is not officially true, it's also not officially untrue. There's nothing official that disproves it.

If published material had just stopped mentioning drow, I'd be free to imagine that something happened to them, or that they're just hanging out off-camera. Instead, the retcon we've been given is such that the drow explicitly never existed. Cities they once ruled are now officially, canonically, objectively, mysterious ruins which they have never inhabited. This is the one, true, correct answer, and any coherent-canon-preserving story I make up in my head about why they're not around anymore is objectively wrong.

I’m fine with that?

What's the point of buying a setting book if nothing in it is still going to be canon in a few years?

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

That example was off the top of my head. My broader complaint is that instead of replacing them with something else, it seems like they've left a hole. Removing Drow from the darklands is like removing humans from the surface world. Now I'm left wondering what species most of the population are if they're not humans anymore.

Serpentfolk are not a valid answer because being rare is part of their fundamental concept. If they're now as common as drow, how is it that they're angry about having lost their old empire and being replaced by humans? That resentment is half their ethos and without it they're just some scaly dudes.

I'm also worried this will set a precedent that retcons of this size are just a thing that Paizo will do sometimes now, which means all setting material is cheapened by its liability to be taken away.

I just don't see this as a very big hole if it even is a hole. If you had asked me last November (before any of this OGL nonsense) "how many Drow do you estimate are on Golarion" I probably would have said "about 10,000" since Elves don't reproduce very quickly and the Darklands are a hard place to live. I have no trouble believing there are 20,000 Sekmin in Sekamina, since hell they named the place for them.

Like Kyonin is probably the least populous of the major Avistani kingdoms, and Elves in sheer numbers trail behind all of the common ancestries. It's just that "Elves get around" is why you can justify them more or less anywhere.

We probably had bigger holes when Pathfinder deleted the entire Cavalier Class during the edition shift, since there were all those orders that did things and now there aren't, probably.

This seems wildly at odds with how common drow are throughout published material. It's too 12:00 AM for me to go looking for prooftexts now, but they're all over the corpus. There's no way they've secretly been rare this whole time.

Cavalier orders were never in-universe organizations, and were never portrayed as such in setting material.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

I'm also worried this will set a precedent that retcons of this size are just a thing that Paizo will do sometimes now,

Paizo did not "just do a thing". Instead, something was done to them.

There's a serious difference between randomly deciding to change something about your product, and being forced to change it because you are under external legal pressure.

If you are worried because you think they randomly woke up one morning and decided to make major changes, then you can relax. That never happened.

If you are worried because some external thing happened that forced them to make major changes, then you're just going to have to manage that anxiety yourself. That DID happen, but no one could predict it or control it. And it could happen again, unpredictably, without Paizo being able to control it.

The decision to stop including Drow in new material was forced on Paizo. The decision to close the door on any coherent continuity regarding what happened was not. They could have treated them like Folca and just not acknowledged them going forward, leaving the door open for people to employ their own headcanons. They've specifically chosen to deny us that freedom. Now that they've done that once, who's to say they're not going to do it every time something they previously wrote becomes inconvenient?

I mean, if you never ran Second Darkness, or Shattered Star, or whatever then it doesn't matter whether or not the Drow were ever around.

If you did run those, then you can make it make sense however you want. Pathfinder as a whole doesn't depend on the specific ancestry of a vampire in an AP any more than it depends on the specific ancestry or class of a PC in an AP.

So I don't think there's a difference between "in some people's versions of Golarion there were Drow" and in some people's versions of Golarion there were never Drow, it was always the Sekmin" any more than it matters who the specific members of the Silver Ravens who got statues on that one bridge in Kintargo actually are.

Only on the very coarse details of "what happened in a specific adventure" matter generally.

That example was off the top of my head. My broader complaint is that instead of replacing them with something else, it seems like they've left a hole. Removing Drow from the darklands is like removing humans from the surface world. Now I'm left wondering what species most of the population are if they're not humans anymore.

Serpentfolk are not a valid answer because being rare is part of their fundamental concept. If they're now as common as drow, how is it that they're angry about having lost their old empire and being replaced by humans? That resentment is half their ethos and without it they're just some scaly dudes.

I'm also worried this will set a precedent that retcons of this size are just a thing that Paizo will do sometimes now, which means all setting material is cheapened by its liability to be taken away.

I understand why the Drow couldn't be retained as is or under that name, but deleting them rather than replacing them seems like a massive error. You could have replaced them with some cool original creation (it could have been as different as they wanted and I would've been fine), but instead we get a retcon that leaves half the darklands in limbo to the point where Golarion as a setting is now incoherent. If the drow were never there, what happened all the times they showed up? What species was the vampire the Sihedron heroes encountered when they went into the darklands? Who in the darklands has been taking all those slaves?

It's like in Doki Doki Literature Club when Monika deletes Sayori. This does not leave the rest of the game intact but without her in it. The whole thing is a glitchy mess now. I feel genuinely betrayed as someone who was invested in this setting, not because I particularly care about the drow, but because now the precedent is set that any aspect of the setting is liable to be awkwardly ripped away. I'm left wondering why I should let myself become invested in any aspect of the setting if this is just going to happen to it.

TheFinish wrote:

The gods do exist, and there's no denying it.

I'm gonna start making character who don't believe in fireballs and sharp metal objects. I'll be unstoppable. :)

Maybe a character who thinks all apparent magic is just Numarian tech?

One could reasonably interpret that non-religious characters are against the rules.

How?

I'm a little annoyed by the fact that the changes are so small. There's certainly nothing here that would have prevented my Lost Star party from being TPK'd. I hope that's just because of the youth of the playtest?

I played with four players, a wizard, a bard, a druid and a paladin. The druid had a cat animal companion. It will matter later that the bard did not have Soothe because she did not know that it existed. The druid could cast healing, but never would up doing so except on her cat. It is notable that as a dwarf who dumped Charisma, the Druid had 0 resonance points.

The four of them, at least as far as I could tell, did well against the ooze. It seemed to be about the right difficulty to be handled by them. As soon as they entered the second room with the goblins, things went south for them. It was an extremely difficult fight, during which both the wizard and cat were knocked down, but not killed. (The wizard said an hour later that he thought he'd been wrong and actually had died, but as it'd been a while by the time he noticed and he might have been mistaken, I continued the game with him alive.) The goblins were generally managing two attacks per round, and the second attack hit decently often. I will note, though, that the PCs were inhibited by the fact that the dancing light alerted the goblins while everyone was still in the hallway and the party was stuck in a choke point as a result.

They were low on resources and health by the time they were done. They went to continue, and the Druid used burning hands to deal with the centipedes with decent ease. However, they were so drained and damaged after those three encounters that they took the loot they'd gotten so far and left the dungeon. I decided that since they'd been in there such a short time, they could use the rest of the day as downtime. As a result, they were able to sell the gear.

Either there were no listed rules for how much gear sells for, or I wasn't able to find them, so I ruled that it sold at full price, on the basis that was the only value ever technically associated with the loot. This allowed them to restore themselves pretty well by purchasing spell-casting services. (I assumed a level 1 cleric with 18 wisdom was easy to come by.)

They went in the next day. They briefly encountered the fungus but ignored it when they realized there was no reason to deal with it. There were no failed saves before they made this decision. Only because I specifically prompted them to maybe actually use an exploration mode action did they seek and manage to find the hidden loot in the larger chamber.

They never checked the pool for the statue and therefore didn't notice it on their first trip through that room. They signaled the goblins with the armor trap. They caught the statue trap. None of them could disable it, but they avoided passing in front of it.

The next goblin fight was more brutal than the last, and half the party was knocked down. This was likewise hindered by the fact that they were essentially in a single file line in the hallway when initiative was triggered. The cat reached dying three, but no one actually died. The druid again made a big dent in the enemy with burning hands. I awarded her a hero point for being MVP.

This one fight left them so resource deprived that they went to leave again, but because I again prompted them to use an exploration mode action, they found the statue. The bard picked it up without thinking and triggered that encounter, which they actually dealt with without too much trouble.

For the second time, they left the dungeon and sold what they had gotten so far to buy healing and spell-casting services. I believe the paladin was knocked down but didn't die in the fight with the skeletons. From there, they used a grappling hook to scale the cliff and get to Drakus' room.

Once again, they were in a single file line in front of the door because they alerted Drakus and he won initiative. He therefore got into a one on one with the paladin. The cat tried to get through Drakus' space and was knocked down by the attack of opportunity when he failed. The wizard miraculously managed to get through his square, but was cut down not long after. The Paladin fell soon after. The druid and bard fled. They both jumped down the cliff, managing to take only a few points of damage. They left.

Drakus used the other door hoping to cut them off. He passed by the statue trap without problem due to his symbol of pharasma, but the rat activated it when he tried to exit the room. This killed him. Drakus caught up to the Druid and killed her, sucking her blood when she was down and he had no more enemies to deal with. The paladin then rose back up, only to be made quick work of.

Had there been a cleric, they would have been better off, but clericless parties shouldn't be invalid. The core problem was that they didn't have enough healing resources to deal with the damage the enemies were doing, especially since the enemies' second attack meant that they only rarely failed to land at least one successful hit in a round. This wasn't just a matter of them not entering all of their fights at full hp. They straight up couldn't handle more than 2 encounters per day.

I'll end on a positive note. I expected to miss attacks of opportunity and have positioning not matter with them gone. It totally mattered, and I don't wish to see them come back.

Edit: It turns out selling rules are in the equipment section, but not in the game mastering section. I don't know how I ever would have found them without ctrl+f. Why isn't this rule listed along with the "selling" downtime activity?

PF2 is a system capable of facilitating non-identical characters of the same class. It is barely hyperbole to say that all 5e characters of the same class are identical.

The "Flipping around" complaint is valid. Too many rules refer to other rules that are pages away. Maybe this happens more than I perceive in other books, but it doesn't seem that way to me.

Creating my first character took about an hour on account of this, when I sense it ought to have taken half that time. Admittedly, I did this from my phone, which makes the scrolling problem as bad as possible, but it would be nice to not have the problem at all.

Currently, the top two most recently-posted-in threads are complaining about the rogue. This one is about how he's too powerful. That one is about how he's been nerfed.

MerlinCross wrote:

It drives me nuts that a system is broken in both ways at the same time by the community.

That's how you know it's balanced.

Or wildly inconsistent.

No one has asserted that multi-classing as a whole is simultaneously overpowered and under-powered. Rather, the problem with multi-class builds is that they are wildly off-curve in most cases. Many combinations which sound like cool concepts don't work or are clearly worse than their pure-classed peers, whilst certain combinations, particularly those involving dips, are far ahead of curve because they get the right combinations of abilities, or simply more abilities than their single-classed peers.

I'm fairly certain there will not be any other channels. Paizo will want to track how many of these were downloaded.

If you see any other channels distributing the PDFs, they will not actually have the right to do so.

You might say that they'll have taken the pirate archetype.

As a game master, my inclination would be to crack down on players who I believe are taking any option with the explicit attempt to retrain it away, barring specific situations like archetypes where you need to hold off on taking it until you meet a prerequisite but then want to be a little bit into it.

Retraining should be away for players, especially newer players, to undo mistakes so that they aren't screwed over by mistakes that they make early on before they really know how the game works. It also means that experimenting is less punished because you can undo decisions that you make that turn out to be bad ones.

John, is your definition of "flexible" something like "I technically have to ability to make a character with 10 classes of 2 levels each that is awful at absolutely everything it sets out to do"?

If it is, there's a fundamental disconnect in how you and everyone else understands flexibility, and it's a bridge that can't be gapped.

Oh hello there! Nice to be making acquaintance with you. I am Abserd.

So I never really got around to playing a Magus but I've GMed for a few, and what I don't really understand is "what defines the class, thematically, except for a Gish that is ready to go right out of the box"?

Like of all the popular PF1 classes which won't be in the PF2 core, the Magus seems the one most defined by its mechanics, so if these mechanics are largely replicable with other things, is it necessary? Like the Oracle merits inclusion in PF2 because you can't really otherwise be a divine caster whose powers come unasked from a curse leveled on you from some deity, and the Witch is coming back since none of the other casters have power derived from pact magic, but what, without invoking mechanics, defines the Magus in a way that's not "good with magic, and also weapons and armor"?

I don't see how "good at swords and magic" is less of a valid flavorspace than "good with swords" is by himself, which is what the fighter boils down to.

One idea that occurred to me back when SF came out is that it might be better (if more complicated) to spread each packet of ability boosts downward, so that, for instance, instead of getting the first 4 at five, you get one at 2, 3, 4, and 5. There could still be a rule that you couldn't use a boost on the same score twice until you reached level six.

I understand that that's a bit involved, but I wish it were true.

HWalsh wrote:

Personally, I hope the addition of Cleric Devotion allows people to make Pseudo Paladins to fill the slot for those who wanted Holy Warriors, but couldn't do LG.

Why would it? Paladins aren't spellcasters, so faking a paladin certainly won't work by taking the cleric dedication (which probably mirrors the wizard one and grants cantrips, then later feats get more spellcasting and a seperate feat grants channel rather than school powers.

It isn't any more or less paladiny than taking an Abyssal Sorcerer Paladin and chowing down on people for temp HP. Still get divine spells, after all.

Abyssal Sorcerer/Paladin is probably a really flavorful combination to be honest will make after release.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:

I'm surprised I've not seen an explosion on the forums about the fact that LN Asmodeans are confirmed to be no longer possible. I've honestly considered making a thread linking that interview just so I can sit back with some popcorn and watch the magic.

Wait, where were they confirmed as no longer possible? This seems specifically strange, and while I admit I'm no Golarion scholar, I've always felt (and ran him that way when I ran it in golarion games), that LN followers of Asmodeus were almost key to the faith. After all, as the Contractually minded fellow that he is, it always seemed to me that he would be more open to LN than NE, as even though both are one step from him, he knows LN are more likely to hold up their end of the bargain.

As for moving away from the 1 step, I suspect we'll see a roughly equal number that grow their alignment count as ones who shrink it. For example, I can see Pharasma allowing worshipers of all nine, since people of all nine are born and they all die, while I can see Irori, for instance, insist on strict adherence to self-perfection and self-discipline (so no more true neutrals), and I can even see ones that add and subtract from their allowed alignments (though I suspect that'll be more in the non-core pantheons, so no more CG followers of Yog-Sothoth, for instance, but NE followers might get admittance, by virtue of Dark Tapestry cults)

It's in this stream.

Edited to link to the correct moment. The way it's worded, it technically says you can't be "neutral" while worshiping him, but doesn't specify which axis. However, I suspect he means morally, because I've never seen someone refer to the ethical axis as "being neutral" without further specification.

Chaotic_Blues wrote:

I can't say that I'm a fan of this idea. It feels like it's pandering too much to power gamers.

This makes me have hope that it might be fairly balanced.

It's usually a good sign when you have some people complaining about how underpowered an option is, and others complaining that it creates filthy powergamers.

Are you suggesting that power-gamers aren't filthy?

I'll admit it. I'm sad Pathfinder is changing at all. I've played every edition of D&D from the original game to 5E, and out of them all I enjoyed PF1 the most. That my system of choice will soon no longer have any official support makes me sad. I think there are probably plenty of people who feel the same way.

I'm also mildly concerned about no more "within one step" rule for Clerics. The character I've played for years now is dependent on that rule, and if Lamashtu no longer allows CN Clerics in the new edition, I'll have to retire him or find a group that's okay with houseruling that back into the game.

There's no telling, but in my mind, Lamashtu ought to allow clerics of many alignments. We're told in ISG that her church likes to recruit outcasts, people who are rejected as monstrous by society. That could be a justification for her allowing even good-aligned or Lawful-aligned clerics, though I don't expect that to be true. If I were designing it, her allowed alignments would be CE, CN, N, NE.

I'm surprised I've not seen an explosion on the forums about the fact that LN Asmodeans are confirmed to be no longer possible. I've honestly considered making a thread linking that interview just so I can sit back with some popcorn and watch the magic.

The nonzero dedication cost bugs me. I can't have e.g. a (Pirate Rogue) Cleric until high levels because I need to finish being either a rogue or a pirate first.

Also, RIP sheylinite Bard/Paladins.

The lack of multiclassing for the other classes is just a space saving measure. Unless the explosion on the forums that this is sure to cause dissuades them from doing this, all of them are going to be in the next one, and probably they're going to be releasing multi-class archetypes as they release classes.

I'm going to try to Port my Barbarian from pf1 into the new game. He was an armored Hulk and a devout worshipper of Gorum. In the new game, I'm going to have him multi-class into cleric, as well as take heavy armor proficiency to replicate his former self.

I consider that a bit of a stress test on the customizability of characters in this game. If I can make that build work, I have to conclude that this New Edition is highly customizable, in that I can deviate from my class in two major ways and have it work.

I'm also going to play a goblin Paladin who was taken as a baby from a goblin tribe and raised by my main Paladin and his Husband, who is a silver dragon. I'm also probably going to make pre generated characters for doomsday Dawn, because my situation for running it is going to be such that I'll need them. I came up with the idea of having a packet of 12 pregens who are all goblins raised in an orphanage for Monsters babies run by the Paladin and Silver Dragon.