Ajaxius's page

I feel like one of the easiest ways to implement Fail Forward that escapes the binary tree is simply by scaling the result--rather like a basic save, in a way. (snip, but the rest is still gold)

You know, that's an incredibly elegant solution to my problem. Applying a basic design principle present on Pathfinder literally solves so much of my dissonance with regards to "fail forward" design that I've basically just 100% come around.

Thanks for keeping a clear head and addressing my misgivings. It's hard to get out of a binary mindset with "pass-fail" after a decade of other games that are just that.

(Stuff about why we're talking locks)

I'm sorry, that's mostly to my benefit. It's a simple example that, while not perfect, illustrates the examples in an easy-to-grasp way for my head. "Simple, roadblock obstacle that necessitates a skill to bypass." It makes it easier to talk about the problem without all the fiddly bits around other problems.

Like, Rituals. Rituals don't have a hard-set-in-stone DC. The DC is set in the rules as such:

...Primary checks usually have a very hard DC for a level that's twice the ritual's spell rank.

...

...Often, a ritual requires secondary checks to represent aspects of its casting, usually with a standard DC for a level twice the ritual's spell rank.

If DC's were hard-coded, they'd be written on the rituals themselves. Paizo leaned heavily on the word "usually" here, but I think it's for a reason.

If it's a plot-important ritual, your PC's are supposed to pass it for exactly the reason this entire thread exists - it's a frustrating roadblock if they don't. If it's not, then it can be hard so there's a pay-off. The Very Hard DC suggestion is just there because sacred cow spells were, more or less, cordoned off into rituals alongside plot-important magic, both of which don't want to be spammed for non-important reasons, so the DC suggestion is there to prevent that. (Of course, this is all speculation on my part, happy to have Paizo staff drop in to just say I'm wrong.)

Now, you don't just have them auto-pass it. You look at your primary caster PC's skills, see what they're good at, see if they can pass the ritual reasonably, and if not, see how many secondary casters would need to crit succeed to help them hit the number they need, and nudge the DC's down from there so that everyone feels like they contribute. Sometimes the party's primary caster will roll a 3 and will have to go again, but that's kind of always the case.

So why not just have them auto-pass if it's plot relevant and doesn't really matter? Because rolling dice is fun. The knowledge that failure could exist adds tension, and tension adds excitement to success - even if it's illusory.

Just to address the particular point of "Just don't give XP" again: I think there's some push and pull here between the expectations of story and gameplay.

At the end of the day, this is a game, and a game exists to be played. The story elements are absolutely vital to giving context to the gameplay elements, but at the end of the day, the players are sitting down to play a game.

This push and pull comes to a head when a GM wants to wrench the gameplay out of the players' hands and break their expectations to push the narrative in a preferred direction. When you have an appropriately-leveled combat, you give the players experience for that. If you don't, you took that away from them, and you'd better have a good reason. I don't think, "You failed to pick the lock I wanted you to pick" is a good reason to take that away from them.

And since we're already off-topic, to touch on my issues with Milestone leveling for a bit - Experience is a useful, mutually-agreed-upon system by which players can measure progress and keep the GM honest about how much adventuring they've done, and how rewarded they should be in player progression. It is a points-based system for rewarding the players for following along with the narrative tying things together. Ditching it for "you level when I say so to meet the needs of the story" is an option, but in my opinion makes things feel a little arbitrary. It leads to the PCs being the toys of the GM to tell the story, rather than a cooperative game at a table where everyone plays by rules.

I feel there's a good design reason that AP's keep experience as the measure of success rather than strictly milestones, beyond just experience being a sacred cow. But I'd be happy to be corrected!

Also, hey, wasn't, this is a discussion about fail forward design?

I can't help but feel I still have some solid questions that haven't really been answered. How do you accommodate the binary tree problem? How do you avoid rewarding failure? How do you design a better game in the first place? And is it worth going through all that effort of implementing Fail Forward Design when it can lead to additional content the players may never see simply because they accidentally passed a check?

The latter I'm specifically reminded of with regards to an adventure I've only heard of second-hand, so my apologies of the details are a little fuzzy.

The players arrive at a wizards tower, and are expected to trust some character at the front door - he departs for a moment, or some skill check is necessary to convince him, I'm not sure which - after which he leads the players up to the tower to set up their meeting with the wizard to accommodate their quest.

But if the players choose to be impatient, or fail the skill check to convince him, they are rewarded with an entire wizard's tower of monsters to fight, experience to gain, loot to obtain, etc. All of this is skipped if they "fail" the social encounter (except wherein the players just gain the experience for having skipped the tower as if they had defeated it.) I see this as the end result of correctly implemented fail forward design, and I can't help but think how much more interesting it could have been if the face of this event was a roadblocking lock (which enables all parties to participate in this content) rather than a doorman.

And if you say, "Well, if it didn't result in a good thing, then it wasn't correctly implemented," it starts to sound like there might be no true Scotsmen left in the world.

While I like the idea of Fail Forward Design, I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I think a major concern I have with it, at least as I understand it, is that you may stop incentivizing specialization.

When the players catch on that they're in a "Fail Forward" game, they may start to push against success, especially if failing is more rewarding - which it inherently is because of reduced investments needed to fail vs succeed.

In the oft-cited example presented so far in these threads:

Jim tries to pick the lock. He fails. This alerts the guards on the other side (who may not have previously been there and were added to accommodate failing forward.) These guards open the door and initiate combat. This seems like some Fail-Forward-Positive design, since they continue to move past the plot-necessary door despite failing the thievery check to unlock it.

What this fails to consider is that combat is a desirable thing in Pathfinder. Whereas a generous GM might make a lock a slight hazard that rewards a pittance of experience (if any at all), a combat comes with the promise of more experience entirely based on the difficulty of the encounter.

Once the players catch on to this consistent design, they start to want to fail. They stop having Jim pick locks, and instead knock loudly on the door to intentionally initiate combat to get experience while still accomplishing the goal of "unlocking" the door. The players learn to gamify Fail Forward design. This further incentivizes combat skills, since you don't need to invest in non-combat skills (since you'll always Fail Forward.)

Now, there are a lot of other parts at play here: the element of surprise giving basically no advantage, lack of attrition-based gameplay leading to combat being "free", and the presumption that the GM will throw level-appropriate content at you. But the more of those you break to accommodate Fail Forward design, the more you depart from PF2e's design decisions that make it a good system to run in the first place.

You can accommodate the Gamification Problem with alternative failstates besides just combat, but at some point you need a definitive solution the players can beat in case they just Don't Roll Skills Good. You end up having to do a lot of work on the back-end to design good Fail Forward failstates that continue to branch outward, just to accommodate that players might fail the check to open the door, or to move the rock, or to convince the king that they need help.

I don't know if exponential work to accommodate fractal failstates is worth the effort in a published book, as compared to just saying, "Failing to open the door means the door does not open." I'd rather have another page of content the players will see, rather than a page of hypothetical content that they missed because they succeeded a skill check.

Easy, obvious, and possibly weakening the daredevil's theme. In order to seem daring, the daredevil needs to seem vulnerable. We discussed in the thread Daredevil defenses (other than AC) seem very, very bad many ways to made the daredevil better at surviving combat besides piling on enough hit points that they can soak up damage like a barbarian. On the other hand, to soak up damage like a barbarian, the daredevil would need 12 hit points per level like the barbarian, so the daredevil still is vulnerable at 10 hit points per level.

I know I'm a bit late to the party on this, and maybe this is discussed elsewhere, but I feel this gets easily solved by letting the Daredevil get an absolutely bonkers amount of temp HP. Way more than it already gets from its class features. Maybe a free action on rolling initiative that gives you temp HP equal to your missing HP, like some sort of adrenaline surge to fit with the theming (a term that shockingly comes up nowhere in the playtest, at least according to my CTRL+F.)

It solves the "trying to be tanky without breaking the verisimilitude of being fragile" problem pretty well. It also solves the "60 minutes of downtime as the medic patches up just the daredevil every combat" problem. It also lets spellcaster healers feel cool for "overhealing" the Daredevil at the start of combat who otherwise, effectively, starts at full HP. Make it only last a few rounds (1-3?) and you encourage the daredevil to get in right away and use their Temp HP before its gone, which feels thematically appropriate. Give it a 10 minute cooldown, and you've also prevented abuse from just barely not chaining combats together.

Maybe some universal way of altering spells by adjusting the amount of actions required. Most spells are all 2 actions which kinda left casters using the same action economy as 1e. Perhaps something trading actions for one of the spell variables. e.g. range, damage, number of targets

Really, I'd just like to see way more 1-action spells.

My proposal for a attributeless/scoreless variant is...

To have an attribute-based, score-based variant. I know, I know, I'm saying, "The best way to jump off a cliff safely is to not jump off a cliff," but hear me out.

Rather than a system in which you use primary attributes to determine your secondary skills based off of them, why not have a system that does it backwards? One wherein your secondary skills determine your primary attributes?

You want a character who can pick locks, make deals, and sneak around? You use your inherent skill point buy to buy the Pick Locks, Mercantile, and Stealth skills, which each contribute to Not-Dex, Not-Int, and Not-Dex respectively. From those skill points, you determine your characters' main attributes of 2 Dex and 1 Int. This relates to how a person truly builds up skills in real life, where adjacency can sometimes determine how easy it is to pick up a skill and become good at it. Then, add in something like Skill Focus from 1e to represent hyper-specialization for the folks with obsessions that don't bleed off into adjacent skills.

Now, this is a simplified version for the sake of example. You don't need to have Dex and Int specifically; you don't need Pick Locks, Mercantile, and Stealth to be skills specifically; it doesn't need to be a 1-to-1 relation with skill & attribute; and a PC would likely have more than 3 points to throw around; but I hope it serves as an example of what I'm suggesting, since one of our end-goals is to find a non-essentialist system, and I think this does a good job at it.

It's wild to me how many people want to ditch Vancian casting. I hope Paizo realizes not to listen to the vocal minority asking for that. It's a fun way for casters to interact with a dungeon-delving fantasy tabletop game. I do think room could be made for other spellcasting styles, going so far to make sure that Vancian isn't the default for all classes, but if a future edition doesn't have at least Wizards with Vancian casting, I'd probably drop the system.

And removing attributes? That seems absurd to me. The system is a fun way to show a character's innate strength and weaknesses. I could see them getting shifted a little, and I could definitely see them fixing up partial boosts, but outright removed? Absolutely not. It's a part of the DNA that makes Pathfinder what it is.

I'm still a huge proponent of the idea that they're a Thassilonian automaton. Xin was a prolific clockwork artisan, after all. And New Thassilon coming back is still relatively fresh in the lore.

What could be more iconic than a Thassilonian using Runes for the Runesmith?

I believe that anyone can study a grimoire when preparing at the start of the day, but it doesn't give them the spells in the book unless they're a prepared caster that uses a spellbook (like a wizard, magus, or esoteric polymath bard.) It just gives them the other benefits.

So, if a spontaneous spellcaster prepares with the book at the start of the day and also just happens to already have one of the listed spells in their repertoire, then they can end the duration of the spell to boost their save against a coven spell.

That's still a lot of hoops to jump through for an absolutely garbage effect, so I changed the hunter's hagbook's "special ability" to the following:

(Reaction)Hag Hunter's Heroism

Trigger: A monster from the Hag family uses an effect on you or an ally that requires a save, and that target is effected by a beneficial spell you cast on it that has a duration.
Effect: You end the qualifying beneficial effect, and the target improves the degree of success on their save by one step.

It helps it feel like an actually effective tool that Drusilla gives the PC's without having a wizard around, and while it's powerful, it also requires you to jump through some hoops.

I am concerned with their quality, but I feel it's misattributed to the remaster. Early remaster products were pretty dang good by my measure, and it's only here, towards the end, that we're seeing quality issues crop up heavily.

But hey, maybe that's just me being starry-eyed from when the remaster came out and I went from having a couple core books on my shelf to actually playing the game.

The thralls should just not take up space and not hinder movement.

I feel as though this might negatively impact class fantasy for Necromancer players. They were already complaining that thralls were "totems" instead of undead because they couldn't move (despite moving being a trap option when you could instead summon them to where you want to move them.)

Goodness gracious minionmancers are hard to balance.

It's essentially the everything attribute. Swarms? Force goes through. Incorporeals? Force goes through. Elementals? Force goes through. Fiends and Celestials? Force goes through. Lifeless constructs? force goes through.

Having the option to choose between Slashing and Bludgeoning with Imaginary Weapon meant that you could trigger what were, in my experience, somewhat common weaknesses while avoiding somewhat common resistances, with the risk that you'd have to try one, then try the other if the enemy turned out to be resistant to the first you chose.

This change means that you lose the ability to trigger weaknesses and you lose a damage die size in exchange for only overcoming enemies that are resistant to both slashing and bludgeoning.

This seems like a net loss to me.

All my commentary here is from the point of view of Magi getting Imaginary Weapon, not Psychics.

Unfortunately, the people you're discussing that with didn't get the memo.

But here's the thing. If you miss Imaginary Weapon, just get Gouging Claw

Gouging claw is not on the occult spell list.

I mean, Thaleon's Iconic Encounter even shows him with hovering Imaginary Weapons, and references that he "shot" the blade toward the woman as if it was a projectile.

...

But I do like the idea of miming, painting, etcetera-ing a ranged weapon in addition to melee weapons.

I always thought this was a primary use-case of the Warp Space amp. Even though Imaginary Weapon is a melee spell, if you warp space such that the spell "originates" from a square adjacent to the target, it effectively makes the feat into the Reach spellshape feat. You could even get flanking by making the "originating" square appear on the opposite side of a target from an ally.

But maybe that's just a ruling I made at my table.

I'm betting the Runesmith iconic is a (New) Thassilonian clockwork automaton, rather than a Jistkan automaton, given the class is the Runesmith. That might explain the aesthetic differences.

Honestly, I'd prefer to return to the old store at this point. I know that's not a feasible option, and Paizo would likely be out a lot of money to whoever they paid for this site, but... man this blows.

Every single feature of the old store was sacrificed solely to make automated subscriptions mildly easier to manage.

Was there no world in which this new store became the "physical" storefront, and then the digital storefront stayed the same?

I've been pretty interested in the draconic codex for a little while now, but this one has tempered some of that interest.

The vorpal dragon looks really cool, but I kinda dislike it being "vorpal," as if "vorpal" is some inherently-existent identity that can be impressed upon dragonkind in some way. It's not awful, but it's definitely off.

And while I love the coral dragon and think it's cool, knowing that it's going to be in both books makes me a little anxious about what other duplicates we're going to be getting.

Still cool, though!

JiCi wrote:

Huh... if the Vorpal Dragon doesn't have a breath weapon, what's gonna be the alternative for any class feature and spell that usually grants one :O ?

I think mechanically it will have a breath weapon, that will deal void damage.

Yeah, the way I read it, they have a breath weapon. It's just that, unlike most dragons' breath weapons which blow, this breath weapon sucks.

I think we should stop asking for realism in TTRPGs.

To preface this: I don't agree with OP, and I don't think we need an overall template for "giant-sized weapons" to have mechanical meaning.

However, I have a couple of problems with how you've presented your counter-argument here.

First, it's the classic misappropriation of, "Ugh, realism? The game has DRAGONS!!!" The point is that people want a degree of realism so as to create a suspension of disbelief. They want things to make sense within the context of the world that they're experiencing. They want verisimilitude. The idea that an ogre with a club sized for ogres won't deal more damage than a pixie with a club sized for pixies breaks that verisimilitude for a lot of people.

Secondly, your argument is just as applicable to the opposing argument. "We should stop asking for realism" grinds against the point someone else brought up that weapons are pretty broadly effective based on design, force, and technique. Realism generally sides with, "size doesn't matter."

All that being said, I think some concessions could be made (and would argue some already have in Giant Instinct for Barbarian) so as to show kindness to the people who want to play the game and for whom this is a problem. You don't need fundamental, underlying changes, but could introduce a handful of weapons that are specifically for differently-sized creatures that have mechanical uniqueness to them in that way. Some weapons that are balanced from the outset to be a "large" weapon or a "small" weapon. You'd only have to thrown in a handful of weapons to create a sense of verisimilitude without overthrowing the entire game's balance.

Maybe Ogre Hooks could be specifically rebalanced to be a Large-size weapon for the Ogres traditionally known to wield them. Gnomish or Halfling ancestral weapons could be rebalanced to both come with penalties for larger-sized creatures trying to use them while providing some accommodation for the strength penalty inherent to the ancestries that are supposed to wield them.

Honestly, I'm of the opposite opinion. I want to see fewer niche ancestral languages. The proliferation that language is tied to race (rather than culture) is a bit of an outdated idea. It also creates this kind of weird idea that dwarves, regardless of where you find them, will speak one common language in Dwarvish. Really, there should be multiple dialects of Dwarvish, and off-shoot languages, and and and... I'm getting ahead of myself.

To address your specific examples

Tanuki maybe shouldn't be a language since the Tanuki are not a socially isolated culture. They're more or less pseudo-fey hanging onto other Tien cultures. They should, generally, adopt the language of the culture they latch onto. (Unless, of course, they expand on Tanuki more to say that there are distinct cells of Tanuki culture spread all throughout Tian Xia, a la halflings!)

Samsaran definitely shouldn't be a language since, by lore, they're just an offshoot of a Tian culture who happen to reincarnate in different parts of the world, then gravitate back towards Samsaran homelands. They should probably just speak a secondary language from where they reincarnated - or maybe even just let them be unique in that they are not restricted by language options at all in exchange for not having a single language to themselves. (Not that many people play with those restrictions in the first place)

Vanara are fine, being a pretty standalone society, and Wayang lived as their own culture in the plane of shadow long before coming to the material plane. But again, case-by-case, if you look at a lot of "ancestry languages," I think many are misplaced.

All that being said, I do agree on Kobolds. However, rather than just saying, "They speak Kobold unilaterally across the world," I'd like to see a small section of various Kobold languages, possibly based on the source of their obsession or locales. Again, dialects would be great, here.

I know all of this is a bit moot, since the core philosophy is, "The game needs to have common languages for the sake of gameplay. Overcomplicating that makes gameplay difficult for very little benefit." But I do still wish Langauge got as much consideration as other unplayed secondary subsystems, like Survival.

The big, glaring one is Elixir of Life.

Elixirs of life accelerate a living creature's natural healing processes and immune system.

Flavor text dictates that Elixirs of Life do not affect undead PC's. If that quote was not there, or if you say "flavor text is not rules text!" then undead PC's could use elixirs of life, and my Blood Lords party with an alchemist would be much happier :)

If making the DC non-terrible means that players stick with older items, then that just shows that they were not excited by the new items' effects. So it is a good thing that they were not forced to change to them! EDIT: IOW, they will be selling them either way, even if only to buy upgraded versions of the items they already have.

1) But then how does the GM continue to provide treasure that interests the players? Shiny New Loot™ is fun. If players constantly get new loot only to find that they prefer their existing items, you begin to pavlov yourself into Shiny New Loot™ not being fun, because you expect the new loot isn't going to be worth swapping to.

2) What does the higher-level item even do in cases where you might not care about the item bonus it grants to a skill, or if the spell it mimics doesn't have a functional Heightened effect?

You've reintroduced a problem that was previously solved by static DC's, which you can now only really solve with sufficiently-power-crept items that overshadow lower-level items so much that it starts to impact balance.

Where are they getting the extra actions to activate "a bunch" of lower-level items?

I mean, that's the point. The lower-level items need to have some opportunity cost so that someone is disincentivized from using the lower-level item version. A low-level item with a good activated ability could cost as little as 50gp, which is roughly 0.25% of a fresh level 20 character's budget. Why would they bother spending the resources on a higher-level version that costs 2000gp when the effect already matches what they want to do and the DC scales? This means a character's power becomes directly proportional to how many low-level magic items that they can buy for essentially pennies.

Tying something valuable that doesn't scale to level (action economy) to this as a cost means that there's still a meaningful cost that doesn't cause the optimal gameplay to have your character be a walking magic item shop, and encourages people to buy higher-level items for a higher DC without making the lower-level ones completely useless.

Otherwise, you basically turn all activated items into better wands, because many don't even need to take up a hand.

My primary issues with item DC's scaling are that

1) In such a theoretical system, you get this issue where you can't really give players meaningfully new items. They'll just stick with their existing items, and sell the new items.

2) The wealth disparity between high- and low-level characters means that high-level characters are incentivized to buy a bunch of lower-level magic items that have very useful activated abilities.

Because of both of these reasons, higher-level items need to be much stronger to compete, leading to higher-level power creep, which damages balance, which leads to PF1e problems of level 20 games being mostly unplayable.

You can say problem #1 isn't a real problem because players can just stack non-invested magic items, but that sidesteps parties who would rather have more gold to reach up to higher-level runes early, exacerbating problem #2.

You can solve problem #2 by restricting investment slots more, and making the activated items require an investment slot, but that worsens problem #1 where the opportunity cost incentivizes you not to drop your level 3 item that gives you some activated ability that's unique.

There might be an elegant solution that solves both problems. I foresee a skill feat that lets you spend an action to upgrade an item's ability's DC for 1 round such that it can't be stacked with trick magic item, and makes the action economy less attractive at higher levels so that there's some opportunity cost to not upgrading. However, I get the feeling the people who want item DC's to scale wouldn't be happy with something like that since it still basically creates the incentive structures that they're chafing against in the first place.

I get that it feels bad to have to throw away old toys when they get outscaled, but getting rid of the system has a knock-on effect that removes a lot of mechanical incentives for character choices.

I didn't think the Whispering Way was a religion, just a group loyal to Tar-Baphon, and eager to grant him more power. am I mistaken there?

If my experience as a player from our Carrion Crown campaign is correct, then you are mistaken, but not by much.

You're right that the Whispering Way is not really a religion, but it's not a collection of Tar-Baphon's lackeys either. It's more of a social club of necromancy-aligned people across the gamut of Golarion's societies, and Tar-Baphon just happens to be one of their very prominent members who they'd like to continue seeing around.

This was always my interpretation

In Battlecry, Paizo included an archetype for the Iridian Choirmaster, belonging to the Iridian Choir, a splinter sect of the Iridian Fold.

The opening line introducing the archetype is, "When the Iridian Fold disbanded,..." However, giving a cursory flip through the book, I wasn't able to find any information about them being disbanded - why, how, or when.

Is there anywhere I can read more about this, or is this a lore-drop solely wrapped up in this one, single line that introduces the archetype?

I love that she doesn't have a clear resolution to her story.

I agree with others that she doesn't really LOOK like an orc... unless this is supposed to be the de-OGL-ified orc look for Golarion? In which case, I'd like to see it more standardized! More orcs like this, and fewer "Green humans with oversized underbites," would make her feel more like she fits right in.

Oh, dang, that Troop Combat demo sounds GREAT!

I would love if this is the beginnings of a war game set in the Pathfinder setting.

That art is from Strength of Thousands and so predates the AI art craze by at least a year.

Thanks for trying to put my mind at ease. At the risk of putting more egg on my face, I'll say I'm still a bit concerned because of the missing legs of the figure in the back, the lopsided eyes, and some other details, plus the fact that Dall-E started doing limited-invite beta testing back in 2019, 2 years before the book came out.

But it's gone from a red flag to maybe like... light-faded orange. Instead of, "Paizo used AI art" to "maaaaaybe a small chance one of their commissioned artists did and got it past them years before the ethical debate became popular."

Oh god, that's not AI art under the venture gossip, is it?! I know you put an artist's credit there, but one guy has no legs, the back of his cloak magically manifests into the other guy's sleeves (whose hat disappears into his bag), and the area behind his cloak turns from stairs into open sky.

I'm so happy to see the "meat and potatoes" of classic fantasy tabletop RPG's return to Paizo.

I'm by no means complaining about the diversity we've seen, but it's definitely felt like the core of Pathfinder has been lacking for a little while.

One concern about the book's art now that I have it in my hands (if you all even check this forum anymore.) The art for Teki Stronggut is a distinctly non-Paizo goblin.

Hopefully you all aren't changing art direction with your goblins and this was just a freelancer issue!