**Advanced Class Guide Playtest Feedback**


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Aight den.

I think the only "bad" thing about this playtest was the limited timeframe. It's been explained why it was short, and I accept that.
It would have been nice to have a couple/three months to go over each version/revision.

Digital Products Assistant

Removed some posts and replies. This kind of stuff is not cool, and the thread will be locked if it continues.


For the next test, maybe a round 2.5 for the class gimmicks that involve choice? I remember most of those had no changes from docs 1-2.

Ex: Bloodrager bloodlines, warpriest blessings, slayer talents, Shaman spirits.

For classes where such a feature impacts the rest of their careers (Sorcs, Oracles, Clerics, Bloodragers, Inquisitors, Shamans) I think those features need a round all their own.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

Dragoon, books have to go to the printer months before they actually are in customers hands. The time to incorporate more playtest feedback was when the playtest ended.

You may or may not like the contents of this book, but it is too late to change it now.


This thread is for feedback on the playtest process correct? That is feedback to be used for planning the next playtest.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

Ah. I misunderstood, since your examples were all products of this playtest.


My bad, I used those examples to show mechanics that would have been affected by a round 2.5 in the recent play test.

If say, the Oracle, was in the playtest I would have included blessings as an example.

Sovereign Court

Jessica Price wrote:
Yep, and in fact, each deity article is now longer than 5 pages!

Awesome Jessica! I'm gonna order this. Do we get the PDF if we buy the hardcover? (I don't quite remember how it worked...)


Mine was pre ordered with Inner Sea Combat as of last night.

Project Manager

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:
Jessica Price wrote:
Yep, and in fact, each deity article is now longer than 5 pages!
Awesome Jessica! I'm gonna order this. Do we get the PDF if we buy the hardcover? (I don't quite remember how it worked...)

I'm not entirely certain -- I think you have to be a subscriber, but that would be a good question for customer service.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Inner Sea Gods is part of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting Subscription, which means Campaign Setting subscribers (and only Campaign Setting Subscribers) get the PDF for free when their subscriber copy ships.

Sovereign Court

is it too late to subscribe... TAKE MY MONEY!!! O_O

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Er... this happens to be an unusual circumstance. Normally, you can subscribe to any line starting with either the most recent release or the next upcoming release, but this month, we have *two* current releases in that line: Inner Sea Gods and Inner Sea Combat. Even though they release the same day, our system considers Inner Sea Combat as the most recent, so you can't currently start a subscription with it. However, if you send an email to customer.service@paizo.com and ask if they can set Inner Sea Gods as your starting volume, I think they can take care of you.


I'd have to say that starting the playtest earlier to give it another round would be ideal. Some things that were obviously bad were not changed after 2 rounds. For instance:

-Blessings sucking for a lot of Warpriests
-Power disparities between Bloodrager bloodlines
-The hunter's weak animal companion
-Swashbucklers still needing intelligence to get the feats they want even though they can qualify for combat expertise using their charisma

This shows that just 2 rounds is not enough. The playtest was taken out of the tester's hands with problems such as these never having been fixed, despite the fact that they were reported as issues nearly at the beginning of the playtest.

TL;DR: Playtest needs to be started earlier to allow more rounds of playtesting.

Designer, RPG Superstar Judge

Adam B. 135 wrote:
I'd have to say that starting the playtest earlier to give it another round would be ideal.

And as they told you, that's not possible because of scheduling. Paizo already started writing the ACG over a year in advance. The second round of the playtest made the book late and everyone had to work hard to get it to the printer in time for GenCon. So adding a third playtest round requires either (1) Paizo to start working on the book even earlier, or (2) even more extra work for everyone after the playtest to get it done on time.

Adam B. 135 wrote:

Some things that were obviously bad were not changed after 2 rounds. For instance:

-Blessings sucking for a lot of Warpriests
-Power disparities between Bloodrager bloodlines
-The hunter's weak animal companion
-Swashbucklers still needing intelligence to get the feats they want even though they can qualify for combat expertise using their charisma

Considering that you haven't seen the final version of the book, I don't understand how you can know that any of the above things "were not changed after 2 rounds."


Sean K Reynolds wrote:
Adam B. 135 wrote:
I'd have to say that starting the playtest earlier to give it another round would be ideal.

And as they told you, that's not possible because of scheduling. Paizo already started writing the ACG over a year in advance. The second round of the playtest made the book late and everyone had to work hard to get it to the printer in time for GenCon. So adding a third playtest round requires either (1) Paizo to start working on the book even earlier, or (2) even more extra work for everyone after the playtest to get it done on time.

Since a lot of people think that the timing of the playtest being over the holidays, perhaps (1) would have been ideal. We can’t change the past, but it might be a good idea if Paizo tries to plan and execute the next playtest differently. How, I really can’t say, but there have been some really good feedback from the community.

Dark Archive

errata based on edition of advanced class guide playtest
downloaded to verify on 4/13/2014

Skald - scribe scroll is not replaced for PFS with spell focus like wizard does - is this intentional?

Shaman

p27 under Spirit Animal:

"The animal also aids a witch by granting..." should read "The animal also aids a shaman by granting..."

Each Spirit Section then is fine (as far as i see), containing a section on Spirit magic Spells, Hexes, Spirit Abilities, Greater Spirit Abilities, True Spirit Abilities, Manifest, and Spirit Animal - except Wind Spirit.

Wind Spirit does indeed have a Spirit Animal section that starts off fine:

" The shaman’s spirit animal crackles
with electrical energy when it moves, giving off light
like a candle, but deals no damage to the animal or any
creature that touches the animal. The animal gains
resist electricity 10. "

However the rest of the paragraph is an accidental copy and paste of the entire wind ward HEX, even mentioning hex duration, etc. It is the exact hex text word for word.

Then to make it worse, Wind Spirit ends with a "Wind Familiar" section that no other Spirit has, and it is sadly just a repeat of the first sentence

" The shaman’s spirit animal crackles
with electrical energy when it moves, giving off light
like a candle, but deals no damage to the animal or any
creature that touches the animal. The animal gains
resist electricity 10. "

So to fix it, remove all of that hex description from the Spirit Animal section, and delete the Spirit Familiar section tacked onto the end.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

Zark wrote:
Sean K Reynolds wrote:
Adam B. 135 wrote:
I'd have to say that starting the playtest earlier to give it another round would be ideal.

And as they told you, that's not possible because of scheduling. Paizo already started writing the ACG over a year in advance. The second round of the playtest made the book late and everyone had to work hard to get it to the printer in time for GenCon. So adding a third playtest round requires either (1) Paizo to start working on the book even earlier, or (2) even more extra work for everyone after the playtest to get it done on time.

Since a lot of people think that the timing of the playtest being over the holidays, perhaps (1) would have been ideal. We can’t change the past, but it might be a good idea if Paizo tries to plan and execute the next playtest differently. How, I really can’t say, but there have been some really good feedback from the community.

Starting earlier is not just a scheduling issue. It's a matter of the staff's time and attention.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

No no no...

The staff just collectively puts their heads together and a playtest manuscript just pops into existence on the table before them Ross.

Schedules? HA


7 people marked this as a favorite.

I think that's a pretty terrible attitude to have. Why ask for feedback if you're just going to brush it off?

Especially when it's feedback about how the playtest itself was conducted that's pretty much unanimous. Doing it over the holidays and in such a rushed manner harmed the playtest a LOT.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

You know, there are some people who don't even have open playtests.

Entitlement isn't a delicious brand of cookies.


15 people marked this as a favorite.
Cthulhudrew wrote:
You know, there are some people who don't even have open playtests.

"They did it, so you should automatically just praise them for doing it instead of providing constructive criticism to make it better!"

Blind fanboyism at its finest.

I would rather them not do a playtest than have a playtest that is utterly pointless because they won't take criticism. It defeats the entire purpose of asking for feedback if you're just going to brush off said feedback.

Do it right, or don't do it at all, in other words. If I offered to paint your house for free and then did a shitty job of it you should NOT be grateful that I painted your house, and are perfectly within your rights to criticize my painting technique.

Was the playtest bad? No.

Could it be improved? Yes.

Are people entitled for providing feedback on a thing that they SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR FEEDBACK ON? NO.

That word is thrown around so much it has lost all meaning and has just become a catch-all for "I disagree with you, therefore you are a whiny baby, neener neener".

It adds nothing to the discussion except a baseless insult from someone who needs to feel superior for not having the same opinion as those "poor entitled children who can't have the same clarity of vision as me from atop this tall horse I ride".


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Wish I could favorite those posts twice Rynjin.


It's a bit of a tricky issue when you consider how things need to be scheduled. When you're throwing in that many new classes at once, with half of them really messing around with basic fundamental assumptions about the game (swashbucklers having dex-based melee, arcanists messing with the prepped/spontaneous line and interacting with spells and items in non-standard ways, skalds forcing the issue of how every other class interacts with the rules for raging, not to mention all the bloodlines and shaman options such needing a look at. In a perfect world, I'd say you'd want a full year's worth of testing.

The problem there though is, there's a finite number of designers around, they have other projects to work on, and Paizo's pretty committed to maintaining a schedule of... 2 new hardcovers a year? Can't really work on a draft of this one on the side while also developing a whole extra book, so the only way that would work is to just full on skip a hardcover in the scheduling and push the finished book back a year.

As is, we've just got this crazy furious development period, with a break for some crazy furious playtesting. Demanding everyone involved respond to every individual comment about each and every class is a bit nuts, especially since any given designer had a lot of classes to deal with, and a couple ended up more or less needing complete rewrites. That said though, it's a whole lot easier to stop and look back over an entire thread once you no longer have people shouting at you from all directions, so I really wouldn't take a lack of designers addressing a particular concern at the time as totally ignoring it.

That said, if there ever is something else like this attempted, I'd think the way to go might be to stagger things a bit more. Get 3 or 4 classes ready for testing, rush out a quick PDF with those, concentrate on the next batch while people are tearing them apart, etc. But then, I'm saying that without knowing how far along in the process testing actually happened, so hey.

There is one thing I'd really like to know though. The CRB classes had the benefit of years and years of testing in their 3.x incarnations before Paizo sat down with them to make their tweaks, and aside from people having their personal axes to grind about this or that, they all got polished up to a real nice shine. This batch, and all the classes from the APG (and Ultimate Magic/Combat for the matter) never had a chance to get that sort of extensive field testing. My understanding is that Paizo really doesn't want to ever go and make an overhauled edition of the whole game, and with the exception of Bestiaries tries to take a "one and done" approach with hardcovers, but I still have to wonder-

If it turns out a class or two from the ACG comes out a bit half-baked, is it possible a few years down the road we might get some sort of second take one the ones that really need it? From this book and others really. There's at least one from the APG with some issues to clean up, and there may be something to be said for tossing rogues a unique trick now that so many other classes can take all their talents (although you could also argue we have like 3 revised rogues to choose from now). If not as a full blown "Misfit Classes Revised" sort of thing, then as a collection of alternate classes.

Granted, it's also possible that the whole book will turn out fantastic, making it a non-issue.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Sean K Reynolds wrote:
Adam B. 135 wrote:
I'd have to say that starting the playtest earlier to give it another round would be ideal.

And as they told you, that's not possible because of scheduling. Paizo already started writing the ACG over a year in advance. The second round of the playtest made the book late and everyone had to work hard to get it to the printer in time for GenCon. So adding a third playtest round requires either (1) Paizo to start working on the book even earlier, or (2) even more extra work for everyone after the playtest to get it done on time.

My playtest feedback is don't bite off more than you can chew.

Designer, RPG Superstar Judge

Everyone's already explained why the playtest can't have three rounds, can't start earlier, and can't run later, but you just don't get it. Things take a certain amount of time, and that time can't be changed without having a disastrous impact on everything else the company does.

You can tell a pregnant woman, "just have your baby earlier," but that doesn't mean your suggestion is actually doable, or a good idea if it is doable.

Maybe when the people who have been doing this sort of work for years (or decades) say "we've tried, but it can't be done, we are at our limits," you should believe them.

Or, if you think they're being stupid, stubborn, and disregarding your feedback, you should prove them wrong by doing it yourself. You'd make a lot of money if you published a 256-page book of 10 new PF classes with archetypes, spells, and other support material.

(If it were easy to design, playtest, develop, edit, layout, illustrate, and publish 10 classes in a year [plus support material like archetypes, feats, and spells for them], more companies would be doing it.)

Designer, RPG Superstar Judge

BigDTBone wrote:
My playtest feedback is don't bite off more than you can chew.

That's a nice sentiment, but business doesn't always work that way.


I think a few more multiple choice questions on the feedback quizes would have helped.

Something like
"I think the niche for this class is
A. Poorly defined/already filled
B. Can fit in some specific setups
C. Has a decent place. Isnt easily overshadowed.
D. Creates a new effective type of roll
E. Creates/inhabits a necessary roll so strong this class invalidates a similar class.

I can't join in the current conversation without risking a ban, so hopefully more feedback will rerail the thread back to feedback for the playtest so that the next playtest will go better.


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I have faith in paizo's ability to make the classes work. I'm more worried on the section detailing how to create your own class and how that's going to come out/work.


Insain Dragoon wrote:

I think a few more multiple choice questions on the feedback quizes would have helped.

Something like
"I think the niche for this class is
A. Poorly defined/already filled
B. Can fit in some specific setups
C. Has a decent place. Isnt easily overshadowed.
D. Creates a new effective type of roll
E. Creates/inhabits a necessary roll so strong this class invalidates a similar class.

I can't join in the current conversation without risking a ban, so hopefully more feedback will rerail the thread back to feedback for the playtest so that the next playtest will go better.

My answer to that question based on playtest doc 2 is

Bloodrager C
Swashbuckler C
Arcanist D or E
Brawler B
Slayer C or B
Inquisitor B at low levels, C later
Skald C
Shaman D or E
Hunter A
Warpriest C or D

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