pogie's page

Druids need to be wildshaped for a significantly longer portion of the day. It should not be a combat only ability.

Played a scenario where a pc was teleported off plane, with the game ending shortly after. The GM ruled, with much player opposition, that the PC was gone, dead, with no chance of resurrection. The PC was irrecoverable. I’ve never seen this in PFS before. Is this within the confines of the rules? I thought res and body recovery were always available if you had the requisite pp or gold.

How is the solution coming? This issue has been posted about for more than 5 months now. I like to read reviews to see what scenarios I’m interested in running and playing. It is frustrating to be only able to read the first page of reviews.

Hey Pogie,

The website has 15 years worth of custom code tying everything together into a giant ball of intertwined cause and effect relations. We're very careful about the changes we make and test them thoroughly, but the slightest change can easily result in something completely unrelated to the area of revision breaking in an unexpected way. I test for these sorts of thing specifically with every revision, but even then it's absolutely possible something can still get past, as new revisions affect things in new and undesirably exciting ways.

Ok, but that begs the question of why is Paizo hanging on to 15 year old code that presents real challenges to providing a stable platform? Wasn’t the website rebooted recently? We’re these just cosmetic changes? I’ve just never seen the outages and issues on a website from a company that relies on their site for revenue.

I don’t understand why Paizo cant keep a stable, bug free website. Outages, bad links, now artwork problems. I’ve never seen a website with so many ongoing issues.

How many times can a PFS group rest inside the gauntlet?

Still broken for all scenarios

stuff

My bad. I thought you were talking annual sales. Over 10 years I’d guess you’re in the ballpark.

I would be genuinely surprised if Paizo has total gross sales over $100 million since 2009. I suspect they're far closer to $50 million. I know that sounds like a lot of money, but when you're talking about international manufacture, shipping, distribution and how expensive each employee is, and how small a business is at $5m/year revenue, it starts to make sense.).

Do you have any data on this? I’d be amazed if Paizos numbers even remotely approached your estimates.

I think if Paizo was truly open to stepping back and doing a complete overhaul, as some have stated, they really made an error in their timeline. 12 months is not enough time to thoroughly play test a design, analyze feedback and make necessary changes before publication. If they were open to large scale overhaul, why the constrained timeline? Why not announce it is 18 months out or “we will play test this as long as is necessary”. Remember how long the D&D next test was.

Paizo said they gave been working on, and incurring expenses, on 2E for two years before the announcements was made. Any reasonable person, of whichbPaizo has lots of, would know that sales of 1e material, would plummet on the announcement of 2E. This puts a dent in their revenue stream at the same time that they need everyone on board to put out the new edition. I think the 12 months from release if plsytestv to finished product is driven by financial necessities that won’t be ignored. I would be very surprised if Paizo pushed back their date even in the face of responsibly widespread claims from customers that thus is not the product we want.

The key to success for 2E is attracting a greater number of new players to replace existing customers who don’t like the new game. That is an uphill battle that I’m unconvinced they can win.

I think Paizo’s design goals are at odds with each other. Keep existing playerbase who on balance like a deep crunchy game, and attract new or 5e players who enjoy a lighter, easier to teach game. The game they’ve come up with is a mish mash that is unlikely to appeal to either camp.

I too would have liked to see PF 1.5. I don’t think that PF can ever regain the market prominence they had after the 4E attrition. If so it would be a long time from now and require D&D to crap the bed again. I’d love to see Paizo get back to its roots and start to write content for 5E. Is 5E ogl? I’m not sure.

CLW wand spam is a problem that seems to exist nearly exclusively in the minds of the devs. I have never once heard a complaint about it from players or GMs.

Contrast that to the amount of complaints that’s are voiced in opposition to resonance, the system devised to fix this supposed problem.

Jhaeman wrote:

Just going to bump this every so often until it gets fixed or someone yells at me.

Thankfully we just fixed the bug preventing people from yelling, no joke. I'll get this added to our outstanding issues, thank you for letting us know about this Jhaeman!

This has been brought up in numerous threads previously. Oh well st least they acknowledge it’s an issue.

But seriously, in order for it to be a "misstep" there would need to be something they did wrong. What exactly did Paizo do wrong here? They took precautions to strengthen the website before launch, and when it did go down they made the playtest documents available through an alternate download source. What was the mistake, not having the resources to make a website capable of handling 10,000+ concurrent download requests?

Are you serious? I’m honestly not sure. I’m going to assume you are. What they did wrong is have a business that relies on their website to deliver PDF while not having or being unwilling to pay for IT support that can allow their website to handle peak traffic. Whatever precautions they took were not adequate and to argue that a business having their web portal shuttered for 2 weeks shortly after their play test goes live isa good thing is frankly absurd.

If it crashes again at the 2E launch are you going to argue its a good thing that so many people want the download? Every minute that website is down is a loss for Paizo and they are accountable for it. If you don’t see that as being 100% crystal clear, you don’t have a very good idea of how businesses work.

Actually Tridus just hit on something I hadn't thought of before.

Even if Paizo has been convinced that a major core system needs a systematic overhaul, I doubt they would make that change during the playtest because such a change would invalidate the entirely of the rest of the playtest.

When would they make that type of change then? Changing core mechanics of the game after it went live would be a poor choice.

The people who manage the website are not the same who design the game tho.
Yes, mistakes from the technical department CAN of course impact sales, but this tells us nothing about the quality of design choices themselves.

This part of the discussion started because a poster stated that he had confidence in how well Paizo runs their business. This was not a discussion of the quality of the game design.

Apparently the inability for a small company to handle tens of thousands of users on their website simultaneously in the wake of a hotly-anticipated release counts as a "misstep" now?

Of course it does. What would the consequences be to Paizo if on the day 2E launches, their site goes down for 2 weeks?

Ultimately, my contention (pretty much nothing more than a guess from reading between the lines) is that the hardcore "I switched from 3.5 and want PF to always be a continuation of that system" cohort is of dwindling significance economically but form a significant majority of the group being turned off by PF2.

I hear what you’re saying but I think it’s a misstep for Paizo to think they’re going to replace pf1 players who don’t like the new system with new players. D&D has too much of an advantage in name recognition and is frankly a better designed game for what it is than pf 2E.

Sorting out which of these issues are Doomsday Dawn specific (a purposeful meatgrinder meant to produce data) and which are systemic to the rule set is important. The chapters being primarily a stress test shapes the experience. The content needed an explicit warning that, like any hazardous test site, things sometimes blow up and people leave unhappy with the results.

If you are sacrificing people enjoying your new game to better collect data, man that is a very dangerous way to run a playtest.

I think it's a small marketing problem.

I think it’s a lot more than a little problem. I’ve asked a lot of local players what their thoughts were on 2E and not one has said they are excited about it anymore. At first there was a lot of interest as love it or hate it, everyone mostly acknowledges that 1e could use some tweaking. After playing 2E though there is a collective “meh” about the new game. We’ve lost a fair number of players to 5e since the playtest started and others have just stopped playing altogether. I really don’t think these players are going to pop back up when the new game goes live.

I personally feel if they want it to be successful, 2E needs a MASSIVE overhaul from the devs,as in starting over. I think there is a bit of burying their heads in the sand and not wanting to acknowledge the feedback they’re getting.

One minute seems pretty short. I would probably go with a 10 minute base duration so it could last through a couple combats or maybe be used effectively in one out of combat situation. I would then increase the duration to one hour if heightened.

I would then change form control to make the base duration one hour but not require the spell be heightened. However, if heightened, it would increase the duration to four hours or something.

I really think this design philosophy, Paizo, not yours is a misstep. People like to be wildshaped when playing a Druid. That is a huge part of the appeal of the class. If casting spells, or scouting while wildshaped is so game breaking why don’t we see more of them in 1e? From my experience Druids are one of the least represented core classes I see at tables.

I spend quite of bit of time playtesting this game. I am running another group through DD starting this Sunday. I reflect on my experience each time and make constructive posts to try to convey my experience running the game to the devs so they can make the best game they can while meeting their design goals.

Other folks do that and more. They put out play reports, player feedback, they math out design elements and tie that to their experience and so on.

Having these sorts of productive posts be drowned out by unproductive white noise does not in any way help the playtest. It hurts it. So, ya, that nonsense gets locked and I am sure bans will justifiable start to follow.

Ok, that’s reasonable. I thought Paizo was taking their feedback through surveys and the actual playtest reports. I thought the boards were just for b#!*~#%@ting about the game.

Ok, yes most of what is said is not useful and there are some agitators out there. I agree. But why lock threads? What is the issue with allowing a non productive conversation to happen? If useful and non conflagratory is the bar we need to clear, you can erase most of the internet.

I'd generally agree with this statement, but most of these threads are just repeating talking points that have been made dozens, if not more, times and than ending in circular arguments. Just look at the last couple of posts about AoOs in the 4e thread, which is neither helpful nor productive, so I don't mind shutting that kind of "discussion" down.

While I agree that 90% of the stuff on these boards is non productive, my own posting included, I dont see the harm in allowing the discussion to take place between parties with interest in continuing. Additionally, I don’t think it’s good optics for Paizo to be steering the conversation.

Basically put other products in your thread it will probably get shut down. Makes sense to me... They dont want to promote other products

While what you said generally makes sense, much of what has been shut down is comparisons to 4E, a dead system. As far as comparisons to 5e goes, a Paizo employee was on the boards the other day saying a healthy 5e is great for Paizo, so I don’t understand the reticence of allowing comparisons to D&D.

There seems to be a marked increase of closed threads under the guise of “this thread is no longer productive, feel free to try again”. Well, those posting in the thread obviously feel it has merits or they wouldn’t be doing it. I understand shutting down a thread that has devolved into acerbic name calling, bullying etc, but it feels to me like Paizo is increasingly trying to steer the conversation. Their boards, their rules, fine. But it seems disingenuous to put out a play test, which many have paid for, ask for input and then actively shut down some of the discourse on the product you claim to want feedback on.

I think it would be great if board users could decide what topics are worthwhile of discussion and not have an active topic closed because of reasons.

pogie wrote:

The design of 2E seems hellbent on stripping fun out of the game.

That is a hyperbolic statement. The design isn't hellbent on anything. You are projecting your own preferences as a sweeping generalization.

I'm having quite a bit of fun. The design doesn't seem anti-fun, just unpolished in some places. You can insist all day that you have some special knowledge of the game design or developers' intents but that doesn't make it true.

I’m glad you’re having fun and think the game just needs some touch ups. Great. That’s not the issue. I’m objecting to you dismissing my statement as hyperbole. Hyperbole requires extreme exaggeration, as in the example I gave above. It’s not extreme exaggeration to claim this design is removing fun from the game. There are hundreds of posts on the boards from people saying the same.

You can dismiss my statement as a “sweeping generalization” but that does not make it hyperbole.

pogie wrote:

Druids are my favorite class. I play a Druid primarily because wildshaping is fun and cool not because of how op or not it is. When I play a Druid I want to be wildshaped the whole day if possible, not because it’s mechanically great, because it’s fun. The design of 2E seems hellbent on stripping fun out of the game.

That's pretty hyperbolic. Fun is entirely subjective. As I said, I really enjoyed the druid.

Do you know what hyperbole is? Objectivity or subjectivity has no bearing. “Paizo is the worst company ever and their decisions on wildshape are the worst design decisions made in the history of rpgs”. That’s hyperbole.

I gave an example of something fun I enjoyed in 1e that is now not possible. This is just one example of quite a few decisions that have been made that just simply remove fun parts of the game. See prestidigitation.

Druids are my favorite class. I play a Druid primarily because wildshaping is fun and cool not because of how op or not it is. When I play a Druid I want to be wildshaped the whole day if possible, not because it’s mechanically great, because it’s fun. The design of 2E seems hellbent on stripping fun out of the game.

If a distributor only gets a 40% discount, then they'd have to sell 60% of their inventory just to break even.

You can’t comment on the distributors break even point without knowing what kind of markup they put on when selling to retailers, to say nothing about what happens to unsold merchandise all along the chain.

The change we made was to remove the fast-pay discount of 5% at the distribution level and that I'm sure was passed along to the retail channel. They are still getting the product at at least a 40% discount, maybe more.

This seems like a very strange move given what’s going on with Paizo currently. With 5E stripping away customers and a reboot of their main product line, customer and retailer retention would have to be a priority. This move hints at some financial weakness at Paizo and confirms my feeling that if 2E is not successful, that will probably be the end of Paizo.

This just doesn’t seem like a move a healthy company would make. Full disclosure I don’t know diddly about the publishing business.

This just annoys the heck out of me. Paizo essentially admits that it broke PF1e by releasing too many poorly thought through options. Now, instead of fixing what it broke, it throws it on the trash.

Hear him! Pretty much how I feel about it.

pogie wrote:

Vidmaster7 wrote:

Except I'm a player that played 3.5 didn't like 4th then played pathfinder and I am looking forward to PF2.

Dang. Any exceptions completely invalidates my statement. I stand corrected and withdraw my statement.

Ugh. Of course there will be exceptions and people ideas and game preferences may change. But on balance, paizo is trying to sell a game design to people who have previously rejected this type of game. Can they make it up with new players? We will see.

What makes mine the exception? why isn't yours the exception?

Yours is the exception because my statement is backed up by the 3.5>4E>PF1 history. It’s real and it happened. If by and large PF1 players flock to 2E then I’m wrong and I’m the exception.

Except I'm a player that played 3.5 didn't like 4th then played pathfinder and I am looking forward to PF2.

Dang. Any exceptions completely invalidates my statement. I stand corrected and withdraw my statement.

Ugh. Of course there will be exceptions and people ideas and game preferences may change. But on balance, paizo is trying to sell a game design to people who have previously rejected this type of game. Can they make it up with new players? We will see.

How do you know what much of core fan base wants? Do you have any empirical data on this? A poll of at least five digits of people reporting? An analysis based upon a reliable sample group?....ad nauseum......

Give me a break. Of course I didn’t fund a scientific study on this. The reason Pathfinder exists is because a large percentage of the D&D playerbase rejected the gamist design of 4E. The same type of design Paizo is presenting with Pathfinder 2E. It’s a logical inference that those same players will not be happy with this type of game again.

John Lynch 106 wrote:

how much has PFS informed or influenced the design of PF2e?

Come on. Jason's not known for weasel-words.

He's telling us that if a rule design makes for a better PFS experience but degrades non-PFS play, non-PFS play outweighs the needs of PFS.

I'm prepared to trust him on that.

That’s not what he said. I think in trying to explain what he said you misinterpreted something along the way.

So... I just want to clear one thing up. This theory, that we designed the game for PFS, is categorically false. We are trying to make Pathfinder the best game it can be. We want it to work for PFS as well, but the quality of the game is priority 1.

This makes it worse. If designing for PFS, at least the degree of homogeneity and restriction would be understood if not agreed with. Saying it makes it a better quality game is a pretty bad misread of what much of your core fan base wants.

pogie wrote:

I don’t understand this mentality of “it’s your loss” if you don’t participate in the playtest.

This concept is central to any process involving representation, whether it be politics or consumer feedback. It's the cornerstone of how change occurs in an egalitarian society. Being absent from the discourse means your interest are not heard and then never acted upon.

I’ll bite. Central to economic theory is th3 concept of opportunity cost. Why would I waste my time giving feedback on a game that I have no confidence I will enjoy playing when I could spend my free time doing something I enjoy more and thus place a higher value on?

But that's the thing: Paizo is making a game that appeals to people. (At the very least, they presented us with a game that was appealing to their in-house playtesters and designers.

But my desires and the goals of Paizos staff as it relates to game design are different. Paizo wants to design a game that will meet their sales objectives. I want to see a game I want to play.

I don’t understand this mentality of “it’s your loss” if you don’t participate in the playtest. It’s Paizo’s job to design a game that appeals to people. If they design a rule set that people hate so much they do not have motivation to continue giving feedback, that’s on Paizo not the player who has lost interest.

I think Paizo’s main motivation for 2E was not to build a better game, but to try and clawback players from 5E. In so doing I think they have severely underestimated the brand value that D&D has and have gone a long way to alienating their core playerbase. The more I read about 2E the more I want to just bring in changes from Unchained into 1e or just go play 5e.

PFS is imploding in my area. Prior to 5E we had a vibrant community with 5 or so stores running games multiple times a month.

After 5E was released the playerbase was halved but still many options to play, maybe not as many tables available but still a good core.

Currently, the playerbase which was further fragmented with the introduction of core and Starfinder is rapidly dissolving with the introduction of the 2E playtest.

What has the experience been in your area? I am not hopeful for PFSs long term viability at least in my neck of the woods.

Bump

The rush of people who will in all likelyhood attempt to get their hands on the remaining 1st edition print lines before 2e officially launches should probably keep Paizo steady enough.

You’re joking, right? I really hope you’re joking.

My fear is that lack of revenue will force them to release the game before it should be.

With the state of the current playtest, the only thing that we might buy are the adventure paths. And since the new APs would be difficult to use with pf1, we would use a different gaming system.

That’s an interesting point. I would have to think that Paizo would have accounted for revenue drop during this transition phase as part of their 2e business plan.

Is your goal to keep focusing on melee? What do you feel is flattening out about the power curve?

Thanks. That’s some solid advice. My animal companion, Allosaurus, used to be a beast, but while he has a great AC, his hp and to hit are falling behind.

I think what gets hard at higher level with this character is that without a ton of prefight self buffing, they are not that great defensively. Saves are good, but hp is on the low side and AC is ok but not stellar for that level. When you are wildshaped as a huge Allosaurus, most baddies will consider you their primary target.

I feel like the damage output, which tore through things a few levels ago, is hampered pretty badly by dr/.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a great character and I love playing it. Just wondering if there’s a better path than more levels of Druid.