Arakasius's page

Your party can act like a bunch of independents and just do their own stuff and then the need for optimized stats becomes more necessary. Or you can use some teamwork and then the optimization need falls away. I’ve found there is a spectrum and the more you work as a team the less you need to optimize. If you do both you’ll steamroll encounters and if you do neither well then you might be in for some tough times.

Does that logic carry the other way? If they do something clever in combat do you just ignore the roll and give it to them? Because that’s the only way it’s even close to being fair. The way you adjudicate things at your table is not the norm for PF2 and it’s no surprise it makes int and cha worthless stats.

The game is made with the idea that it tries to balance the stats against each other. Dex and Wis are still powerful but not the all powerful stats they were in 1. Cha and Int are mostly out of combat for classes who don’t have it as their primary casting stat. Even the main in combat use of Int is another thing that is very DM dependent in recall knowledge. When you devalue those two stats it just makes it very easy to get everything you want in your four stat ups. Having easy to find stat to damage devalues that even more and pretty much makes stat allocation pointless.

Sure but by playing like that you’re devaluing non combat stats. Which reinforces this behaviour that you should take primary stat and then dex/con/wis, which will feel punishing to people whose main stat isn’t one of the 3 save stats. Turns out if you remove a lot of the usage of int and cha (and much of that is out of combat) then you’re going to make those stats not really good to take. If someone in my game does out of combat stuff the rp matters ofc but so does the skills they use (general plus skill feats) and so does their actual rolls.

Anyway they gave you four stat increases and I agree that having non str to dmg not be common because it forces decisions on which stat to take. If you want that extra dmg you should have a trade off on what you give up, whether that be saves or non combat utility.

I agree here. There are some legacy issues that I think were carried over as sacred cows from PF1 that should have just been simplified. Similarly some rules for balance in tiny small edge cases that weren’t needed.

Because like we have said if you didn’t take the feats for them you were missing a whole bunch of to hit and other riders that were pretty important. Very few classes had feats left over to sprinkle into maneuvers. Sure they were useful at low levels if you cornered a caster but they were dead anyway since you would rip them apart with AoO. If you wanted them to be useful against actual melee combatants you had to build for it.

Edit: And just like the Magus thread even if tripping was the right move people didn’t want to do it because they’d eat an AoO for doing it. Just the fact that feats gave you such a huge bonus for doing things made the opportunity cost for not doing it quite big. If something gave you a big damage boost or you had a huge accuracy bonus you just wanted to do it all the time even if it wasn’t optimal. PF2 is more about giving you options and not numeric power so I’ve found players tend to be willing to be more flexible.

Sure but the feat chains are smaller so the investment needed to max something is smaller. PF1 you might have had space for two if lucky but some like demoralize or some teamwork chains took most of your build choices til level ten or so. PF2 you probably have space for 3-4 specialization a depending on choices.

Sure you can take an archetype that gives improved trip as a feat but then you’re missing out on archetypes that give far more power. And nothing you said really contradicts the fact that maneuvers took serious character investment to even be viable in PF1. If you didn’t make a character choice to opt in to the maneuver feats than they were unusable and thus not in your tactics toolbox. While a character with decent athletics in PF2 is quite capable of pulling off a trip of a situation comes up.

It’s specialization vs generalization. PF1 required specialization due to the nature of feats and how they have so much numeric bonuses. PF2 feats are lower powered but also more open ended. It’s nice there isn’t a whole thing about the “trip guide” or the “demoralize guide” and so on.

Arakasius wrote:

PF2 allows characters to do things baseline with no feats at a much higher level than PF1, hence a character with no trip feats can still function at it.

This isn't quite true. You don't get very far with Disarm, Grapple, Shove, or Trip unless you pick up Titan Wrestler. Then there are a pile of feats that make maneuvers better, combine it with another maneuver or Strike or leverage a weapon too.

Titan wrestler doesn’t give a numeric bonus or change AoO. It just means it can scale to being used on huge characters. If you’re fighting another medium character it doesn’t do anything at all. Most of the monsters in the game are either medium or large so it’s not really necessary.

And even if it becomes so at some point it’s a skill feat which you have more of and won’t conflict with your more powerful class feats. Plus the feats which improve it usually are giving an extra effect or improving action economy not making your accuracy to trip better. Thus they’re more efficient or they get debuffed more but on chances to actually trip you’re still capable.

So yeah there are options to make tactics better in PF1 but they’re pretty much all tied to feat chains. You can specialize in 1-2 things and be almost auto hit on them. PF2 gives a much higher baseline so a player can do things they are not an expert at to a reasonable degree of success. PF1 just didn’t hence it’s not as tactical game because your options are limited. There are just too many feat chains and prerequisites gating common abilities for them to be part of every toolbox. All maneuvers and demoralize were useless without investment.

The problem with generic tactics in PF1 Deriven is the specialty. Basically if you didn’t take the feats to make those good then they weren’t good. No one tripped in PF1 unless you had the trip feats. So unless you went for that feat line you just didn’t do it. Since most people went for the damage buffing lines it just meant you didn’t trip. PF2 allows characters to do things baseline with no feats at a much higher level than PF1, hence a character with no trip feats can still function at it.

Say look at trip. To do it in PF1 you needed improve trip to not provoke AoO. For that you needed combat expertise. For that you needed 13 int or you needed Dirty Fighting from a random splat book that came out years later. So yeah the 13 int was a hard no as a pre req on martials to a mostly useless feat that was a prereq to actually trip. Grapple the same thing.

It’s kind of a boggle that you’re comparing PF1 to PF2 here. We have a 200 post thread that Magus don’t work because 1/4-1/3 of the time they’ll eat an AoO on spellstrike if they cast. Well guess what in PF1 unless you took points in a mostly worthless stat and took a useless feat prereq then you took an AoO on every combat maneuver. Hence unless you were building for that feat line no one ever tripped or grappled. It goes back to specialization if you didn’t have the feats in PF1 you just weren’t good at things and thus didn’t do it. Maybe a fighter would have feats to burn but at a feat every other level certainly no one else did.

I don’t think PF1 at this point has that stuff either. They had some stuff that just kinda worked that came over from 3.5 but that wasn’t legal either even if it did fit the framework. I’m sure give it more time and they will add more rituals and other downtime focused systems which will allow more stuff like this. I don’t think it’s a huge priority compared to getting much loved classes over from PF1 though. Paizo at the end of the day is a small company and they have to choose what they spend time on.

That's why PF1 was so hard to make run well. I put in the work to make the players use tactics. It took enormous work to account for all the player options at high level. But I made sure there was no easy win without extreme luck. It burns you out in the long-term. Each new book seemed to add some nutty option that made the characters even more powerful that had to be accounted for.

I don't have to take the same measures to challenge PCs in PF2. That is probably the main reason I decided to move my group to PF2. I can focus more on story and role-playing rather the hours I spent making NPCs and monsters challenging in PF1. NPC design in PF1 was like building characters and even harder the higher level they got. Very time consuming.

Using hero lab (the old xml app one not the web app) was an absolute requirement for DMing PF1. I would take some monsters that seemed reasonable and tweak with them adding templates or changing stats to get the enemies to the level I felt they could be a challenge. Even at level 10-11 I had to bump monsters up to level 15-16 level to be a challenge and I wouldn’t even call the group that optimized. They just took mostly good stuff but were decently well rounded. Without hero lab it would have been impossible and even with that it took about an hour to put together a fight.

Another thing on the tactics issue was how well you could do it at low levels depended a lot on your build. Mainly a lot of builds took multiple feats/levels to come together. For example the last game I played my Inquisitor had power attack, combat expertise, pack flanking, outflank, paired opportunist, etc. We switched over at level 8 and I don’t think I had gotten all my feats yet since I didn’t take human. Anyway the long feat chains leading up to your “press 1” combo really didn’t leave any build choices for alternative tactics. If your DM was nice with retraining it could help but otherwise you’re stuck into waiting a long time for your stuff to come on.

Sure you could play PF1 tactically but really the only time it held up was low levels. So yes low level PF1 and PF2 are similar in tactics. The problem is scaling. Once you got your “press 1” combo online tactics went out the window since why coordinate when you could just win? I think someone said it before but PF2 is taking that low level experience of PF1 where things were more deadly and heroic feeling and stretching it over 20 levels and removing the epic part that didn’t work since it was just rocket tag of who could get off their kill shot first.

Turns out casual players in my experience don’t like having their character choices dictated to them by the experts in the party or the GM. If I want to get the most out of the PF1 chassis that means I want to be doing cool and crazy stuff. This means they have to as well and turns out people don’t like having choices dictated to them. So either they’re unhappy as their oddball build doesn’t work or the optimizer is upset since they can’t do the cool stuff. And since gaming groups are usually determined by things like “I work with them” or “they’re my friends” that usually doesn’t correlate with gaming approach.

Casters were definitely tactical in PF1 and more effective. They had better versions of the spells they still have while also having things like superior summons and other stuff like pit spells and such. Casters were and are still very tactical. They’re not as reliable anymore though which I’m not sure how that changes things. They generally can’t win fights with one spell anymore so their power is capped. I do think the absence of that type of spell does make it that you need a more varied bag of tricks since you can’t just build a feat/metamagic chain to win.

On martials yeah it’s not even close. Just the fact that doing anything massively cut into your damage because of full round actions is a big thing. Martials in PF1 we’re massively disincentived to do anything but swing away. Occasional you had a build that was built to debuff, but generally again that was only to enable more swinging away. Teamwork feats existed but they were generally considered trash except for the class who could fake it in Inquisitors. The best “teamwork” class was the one who just needed a body to qualify.

So yeah even if you take out the fact that PF2 feats promote alternate play styles while PF1 feats favor damage/accuracy bonuses the plain and simple fact is three action economy vs full round + step martials made PF1 a vastly less strategic game for anyone who full attacked. Jason even went over that in the video linked above. PF1 was a game where you spammed 1 all the time. Hyperspecializing and I Win abilities/combos just aren’t tactical no matter how you spin it.

It’s really hard to comprehend a post that goes on about how PF2 combat fails in being tactical and such and touts 5e (oh did you get advantage or impose disadvantage) or PF1 (oh you moved I guess that was a mistake you lost most of your damage) as superior tactical games.

Just from three action system alone PF2 is far more tactical then the other two options. You don’t win the fight on the first turn so inherently the decisions you take in combat matter more. This is supported by new groups being much more successful than PF1 vets because they’d been trained that not to move and fight statically was the best thing.

The question is how to make a d20 ttrpg difficult with high accuracy for the players and low accuracy for the enemies. The turn based rpgs out there that have been mentioned all have issues or forced gameplay paradigms that just don’t work in a game that needs to be as flexible as PF. Theoretically I’m sure it’s possible but I’ve seen no practical suggestions that will actually do it.

PF1 and 5e both could satisfy the feel good accuracy requirements but that meant it failed horribly on difficulty. 5e was forced to invent legendary and lair actions and PF1 never even solved it at all, forcing DMs to massively adjust enemies to be a threat at all and it still led to rocket tag.

I can understand and sympathize with the frustration that high accuracy for enemies and low accuracy for players causes. But people need to realize that a lot of the problems with PF1 was because you could get skills/attacks/defences high enough to be auto successes or close to it. It feels good but it makes the game really hard to balance and make difficult.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Do you know what the most common results are if you turn the difficulty sliders up on a video game?

I mean, I haven't played many video games where your attacks are just expected to fail with significant regularity and getting downed by enemies is completely a matter of RNG.

That sounds like kind of a terrible video game to play, tbh.

I mean I guess Darkest Dungeon or XCOM or Fire Emblem can feel like that sometimes but that at least has the benefit of you directing multiple characters at once (and expendability kind of being a game theme, as opposed to a tabletop where the opposite is generally true). And in both games like that and traditional turn based RPGs, frankly I don't remember anyone ever telling me their favorite enemies were the one with really high dodge rates. Those types are usually considered pretty obnoxious.

That's not to say PF2 is a bad game but the tabletop-video game analogy doesn't work very well because many modern games tend to put control more in the player's hands. If I die in, I dunno, Dark Souls it's because I failed to properly avoid an attack, not because the bad guy hit his 30% chance to instantly down me with a crit.

The stakes are a lot higher in a tabletop too. Failing a mechanic in FFXIV at most means I have to redo the fight I was just on. The game's not going to delete my character if I do, but that's a real possibility in PF2.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare a table top turn based game to a CRPG that’s in real time. In games like that that the movement mechanics is the dodge mechanic. Whether it’s a mmo or single player game there is hints for the attack and if you don’t move/mitigate you take massive damage or die.

So to compare it to turn based game well I have a lot of experience there as a player of XCom, FF tactics, fire emblem, fallout tactics, koei games, etc. Those games do have higher hit rates but the way they add difficulty I don’t think really translates to a table top rpg.

Some do it by attrition. XCom is a good game for example but it’s based around limited use weapons and the game is deciding when to use those super powerful abilities. I don’t think the playstyle really carries over well to PF. One day adventuring is a thing and we saw how those sorts of abilities played in PF1.

Another thing XCom and fire emblem do is allowing control of enemy engagements. They don’t move til you agro them or enter their field of vision.The enemies are much more powerful than the players for most of the game but you win by funnelling enemies and dictating when engagement starts. This is an okay way to play Pf but doesn’t work very well when you just have enemies start next to each other. It really doesn’t make for a good playstyle when you just creep slowly all the time. Sure it makes sense for a dungeon crawl but that is only a subset of ttrpg combat.

Some do it by map placement and starting positions. For example FFT often puts players in disadvantaged situations. It works because of that but that breaks down when you put them on an even playing field. So this stuff works fine in pf but you don’t want all battles to be like that. You want the system to work when it’s a variety of situations including just being face to face.

Another way to do is is dropping in fresh waves like XCom.This can work for all sorts of games but it does tend to break engagement and versamilitude when done over and over. It’s only something that can work so many times.

The thing that all these games have is their different ways of doing combat and battlefields. Problem is ttrpgs have to support them all. XCom would not work if you started the enemies and you in a crowded room, they would just destroy you. Attrition doesn’t work well in something like fire emblem because the attrition in that game is really light and you can pretty much fight til weapon charges run out which is really hard to do.

Most of these games work on having enemies more powerful than you because that is what is needed to make it difficult when you give the players the advantage of controlling the terms of engagement. For ttrpgs you need a system that works regardless of placement or initiative. Both PF1 and 5e have issues with that. How do you give players accuracy advantages and powerful effects but have difficulty? Well turns out both of those games just fail at it or slap bandaids on it. It’s one thing to say it’s so easy to give players both good accuracy and difficult combats when the other current editions of ttrpgs haven’t figured it out at all.

We have seen with PF1 and 5e how those teams designed with regards to high hits. This is mostly with spells ofc. Would I mind something that made attacks easier to hit while leaving spells unchanged? Sure but I think it would take away from the simplicity of the system in having any attack be able to be rolled against any defence.

In PF1 they never solved the ramifications of accuracy. Whomever goes first wins. The only time that didn’t hold true was low levels where there wasn’t any effects capable of winning the battle. In 5e they did this first by giving enemies massive amounts of hit points. That didn’t work so they then started making bosses have lair actions and reactions. Thus the player can do their high accuracy fight winning ability but the DM has a number of “no you can’t win the fight right now” abilities. I find that model massively unsatisfying.

So I think that shows why they have spells at lower accuracy given their higher power. But attacks would that be broken if the accuracy was higher and it was more about hits and less about crits? Sure I can see that but it takes away from the unified attacks/defences paradigm. For example in previous edition touch AC was a way to make casters and some others hit despite the regular AC still being high. It was effective at giving two lines of attacks for AC. But I agree getting rid of it was likely good for the game. Anyway I don’t have any problem with making changes to make physical attacks more accurate and I don’t think it would have that huge an effect on the game. It would make the rules more complex but maybe that’s worth it for some.

Edit: anyway we’ve seen both complaints about players hitting too little and enemies hitting too much. That combination of complaints suggests they just want an easier game. Sure enemies hit you a bit more this edition. But you hit enemies less and it’s pretty even. If you allowed your defenses to be higher to have enemies miss more often than you need to up the damage or effects they do to have a similar difficulty game. If you just lower accuracy and nothing else the game is just easier.

Edit2: anyway having players miss more often and having them be hit more often can both be considered as feel bad. But we’ve seen that with other d20 systems when they go with that way you open up a host of other issues. Including are difficulty balancing, making special rules for enemies to be able to survive it, rocket tag, etc. Would it be nice if you could have that better feel without those problems? Perhaps but I’ve not seen a design that pulls it off.

That’s the issue, what one player finds as fun and another find fun don’t stomp on each others fun in PF2. Last PF1 game we had a guy who took monk and random monk feats. Then we had optimized wizard and inquisitor (me). Our definitions of fun stepped on each other. It’s not that anyone was even taking any odd feats. Our GM restricted us to core and APG. We weren’t taking any weird splat books. But the wizard could invalidate most fights and the inquisitor did more damage than the monk and had more skills and had spells. Both ended up dominating the table time a lot more than the monk. (Or our cleric who didn’t quit but is also more casual and just tries to RP and ignores the PF1 mechanics)

Eventually the monk went from playing to coming and reading the phone til their turn came around to skipping sessions to quitting. This is not the only time this has happened. Some people want to just play casual and it doesn’t work with people who want to delve all the options that exist. All casual or all optimizer groups can work but I’ve not been able to find such a group. It’s good that you as a DM are trying to make your group has fun but at a lot of points the gulf between characters in PF1 just makes for a bad experience. Generally you just want to play with friends and good luck finding 4-5 friends who play in similar styles.

My point on the narrow hit/crit ranges is I agree raw hit/dmg can look samey. What differentiates monsters in PF2 is their abilities more than raw stats. If you or your dm play monsters as just blobs who swing away then I agree they’re going to look similar. If you lean into their special abilities then they’re not. I also agree that the 10 hit/crit rule tends to make combats more missey and that also feels weird to people coming from PF1 even if the battles are roughly over in the same amount of time.

But despite those flaws it works for me because you can roll any attack vs any defence. That to me is cool and is a nice part of the system. Would I mind something that makes hit better for martials? Sure but I wouldn’t want to change hit/crits for spells/skills. I wonder has anyone tried tweaking the rules on things like agile weapons? For example making all weapons have improved MAP? (Aka default to -4, -8) and have agile be -3/-6 and so on. That could be a quick fix that improves martial accuracy for people who want to swing a lot but likely wouldn’t unbalance anything.

Like has been said a bunch before PF is just fine with a bunch of casual players who take feats and such. It’s not challenging at all and can be run as is. Problem is with groups of unequal investment. The difference between players is so big when optimization is brought in that it marginalizes players and makes them quit in frustration or at best they just sit as passengers surfing their phone. Expert players dictate to the party what choices they should make in character building and dominate the table. And when that first optimizer steps in the DMs work skyrockets as they now need to both challenge that player and still allow casual players to shine. It’s a balance that needs to be respected for the game to work and no game i’ve ever been involved has pulled it off. And that’s magnified by the huge difference between classes and the fact the game doesn’t scale well into the teens.

I do agree that the +/- 10 does have some issues. Mainly it makes the range an enemy can be used as narrower and it does narrow the range of stats of any kind at a specific level. I still find there is a good range of damage and hit but when it’s like +/- 3 to hit or +/- 10 to damage at a level it doesn’t feel like as much a difference. Of all the things in PF2 that’s new this probably has one of the bigger effects in feel compared to PF1. The gameplay is a lot better but the feel feels weird at times.

Except it is. We’ve all played PF1. Everyone of the things you mentioned fell to whom went first when hit chances were that high. Sure if you’re saying spell effects should have middling accuracy but weapons shouldn’t I suppose that’s one way to do things. However a lot of what I’ve read on complaints on Spellcasting in 2e is also that spell hit chances are too low so I don’t think splitting the rules would solve much. But I think one of the cooler things about PF2 is everything on the same scale. You can roll attacks vs saves and skills against defences.

Generally if you make it easier to hit then by default it makes the game easier. Right now in PF2 at same CR it’s mostly a tossup with slightly better raw numbers on monster side and better multipliers on party side. The game has shifted from who goes first and guaranteeing hits to situational mods and preventing crits. It’s just a fundamentally different type of game.

I can understand not wanting to miss but there is really no way you increase that back to PF1 levels without just bringing back the problems of PF1. Rocket tag existed for a reason because going first meant you won the game. Who cares about situational defenses, more hps, fast healing, etc if you just won the battle on the first turn anyway. I suppose you could take those types of effects out of the game but that’s not fun either.

There i suppose is one way that you can increase the difficulty while keeping easy to hit. Do what 5e does with lair actions and such for bosses/elites. Basically give them a bunch of extra reactions and more actions as a bandaid. And I hate that about 5e where you are much more likely to have your action hit but also guaranteed to have it be failed because of the lair actions telling you no you can’t do that.

Probably the +/- 10 rule has the biggest effect on how the game feels to the previous game. Basically the game switched more from balancing around being hit at all to having being hit be more of the default and preventing crits be more of a thing. Now it does open up crits more to players where before it was only open to specific feat chains. I can see how people might prefer the PF1/5e paradigm where you just give enemies a big bag of hps and you chip away at it more consistently. Even if in the end in 95%+ of cases enemies die in the same amount of time. It’s a very clean solution and it’s really nice how it applies universally but for people used to something else I’m sure it could be a surprise. And if you just tune PF2s enemies down than you’ll get a huge amount of crits so it’s not exactly an easy fix.

Levelling up and choosing your character of choice is the fun in PF1. I mean it’s cool you’re playing it with your family but you have taken away the funnest part of the game. By restricting content and levelling them yourself that really takes away the fun parts of PF1. I still don’t understand why you don’t go with 5e. You can by default get that OP feel and you can let them dip their toes into making character choices. 5e advancement does have very limited advancement but at least there is some with feats vs abilities and the level 3 choice. Plus the game is far more rules light and easy to run as you won’t have to simplify the many clunky systems 3e/PF1 has. But I suppose it’s a good way to guarantee having a PF1 group to GM.

Yes you can’t win PF2 at character creation. I think it’s clear that’s an explicit design decision. I can understand that not being able to do that is not for everyone but overall I think it’s a good thing for myself and people I’ve played with. Problem being for you to win at character creation than either someone else in your party loses as you outshine them or if your party plays well together than your DM loses because they have to deal with running your game since at that point no AP or base content is going to challenge you.

Everything has to do that. Sure you can buy a campaign in any system that fits your players needs but the players in your campaign are different than the players in mine. No one can make a campaign that satisfies everyone. Even just dropping difficulty there is balance between RP and combat, sandbox and rails and so on.

In PF1 we’ve gone over quite well so the things that needs to be done to run adventures. Mostly balancing issues from sheer amount of untuned content plus difficulty with rules interactions.

5e has its own sets of challenges because of the minimalist nature of the rules. DMs often have to invent rulings or flesh out stuff along the way since Wizards doesn’t do it for them. How much do things cost? Where can you buy or make them? Dunno figure it out yourself. Hope your players like your decisions since you can’t fall back on Wizards implementation.

PF2 is a simplified version of PF1 so it has a lot of the same issues in prepping that PF1 does. It’s just easier to do because the math is the same between classes and it’s a lot easier to make broad fixes to tune the campaign.

Dimity wrote:

N N 959 wrote:

If I have to *constantly* change the difficulty level of the encounters to compensate for the +10 crit mechanics, then I'm not going to GM.

The most common suggestion is to give the players 1 extra level. Done. No further adjustment required.

The average person who buys an AP is not going to search the forums to find out that they need to add a level to any random AP. The overwhelming majority expect to play level 1 at level 1, as they should. When the AP says level 1, expecting a GM to know that's level 2 is nonsensical.

The more burden you put on GMs to have to figure out counter-intuitive changes like adding levels at the start of a level 1 AP, the less people will want to GM.

So? It’s still far better than PF1 where most GMs quit because of the difficulty and amount of work required. There is no argument that holds that PF1 is easier to GM. It can be a very good game with the right GM but balancing, tuning and making PF1 campaigns fun is a ton of work. Like DF has said PF2 is a lot more GM friendly.

I find it really hard to take seriously complaints about adjusting APs or base content in PF2 when PF1 requires massive DM adjustments to keep things reasonable. Now sure if you didn’t mind massive discrepancy in strength between characters and massive issues in tuning throughout campaigns I guess you could just play PF1 APs and content as is.

But to make a fun game through to later levels than massive DM work was required. You needed to curate feat and ban things from splat books that Paizo hadn’t vetted well, you had to adjust classes for things like the UC reworks since often time Paizo made vastly op or under tuned classes way worse than the diff that exists in PF2. You had to change monster stats constantly to adjust them to the level of the party, you had to tweak enemies/encounters to make it that you could challenge your optimizer while not punishing your more casual players. You had to figure out how to make skill challenges work when you had characters that couldn’t fail it mixed with characters who couldn’t pass it without a 20 and then add in characters that could use magic to bypass it.

So above is all just a part of the things I had to do as a DM to make PF1 work. If you do so then it could be a great game. But that’s a ton of work. In PF2 I can just take a monster out of the bestiary and use it and it works most of the time. At most I stick elite or weak on it and I’m done. If you want players to be more epic than just put a level on the party. If you wanted to make PF1 challenging it was hours of work a session. Just a completely different work requirement needed.

Yeah there is no way to make a blanket rule that modifies generic enemies to adjust difficulty fairly. Some classes could push numbers so high to make such adjustments pointless. Some classes didn’t even care about numbers other than initiative since if they went first battle was over. So the only way to counter a party with optimizers was to be an antagonist DM. “Oh sorry it’s just random luck you’re fighting incorporeals or immune to save or dies or insane DR enemies. Oh these goblins you fight are immune to crits? How odd. The only way to make encounters challenging is like DF said to metagame against your party.

As for your point Temp I don’t understand why you’re playing PF1 if not for those crazy combos. You’re certainly not playing it for ease of play. I’m sure looking up maneuver flow charts for the hundredth time is exciting or other random rules interactions you had to look up on the forums. Not playing it either for the static combats or rocket tag. Like if you just pick up PF1 and take random feats what’s the point? The character building is the only thing the game has going for it compared to 5e or others. I spent as much time making characters in hero lab as I did playing the game.

More than half the players I ever played with didn’t want to deal with learning a game and just wanted to play and roll dice and PF1 is a bad game for that. But every group always has a couple who want the optimizing and once that happens it’s like oil and water. PF1 is a game for experts and it can be great when played as such. However every game I’ve ever participated in had a mix and the experts wanted to do the cool stuff and the non experts were like “can we play 5e?” and the game died. I could theoretically see a PF1 game where a bunch of non optimizers manage to hit the sweet spot but I don’t see what the point would be.

Temperans that was exactly my point last page. PF1 can be wonderful if everyone is at same skill and level. Then you can have a lot of fun even with optimized builds (provided you had a DM willing to put in the time). But PF is a group game with the average four player party. Once that equilibrium gets shifted PF1 falls apart.

I think mathmuse had a good balanced points about a lot of the other issues PF1 had and some good points about a couple issues with PF2. I wish they had gone to even simpler rules. And I do agree that +/- 10 works a bit oddly for martials. It’s fine for casters but works a bit odd for martials.

Problem is mastery in PF1 only needed as far as finding a guide. Just go to Zeniths and you’re done. But the gap between people who did that and people who didn’t was huge. So DF is kinda right. If you wanted to get stronger and choose those feats they did make you stronger. But if everyone else knows about them then no it doesn’t you’re back to even playing field. But if you are a person who knows where to look and others in your group don’t than it’s not going to be a pleasant group for players or for the DM. It’s very hard to DM when one guy can’t miss and the other needs to roll a ten to hit. And it’s no fun being that guy missing half the time when your party mate is hitting all the time.

So if you want a game where feats give you that much boost is it because those feats exist or because you found them and your mates didn’t? If it’s the former I can understand being disappointed but it’s necessary to flatten that learning curve so everyone can contribute without having system mastery.

Exactly. Most of the RP I saw in PF1 (myself included) was warping the story to the abilities you chose because they were superior. Now RP comes before numbers. There are a very few number gainers but they’re pretty slight and because of less bonus types fairly well capped. Often you can get them in different ways but because status and circumstance bonuses are all you have really there is a limit. Being superior is more now tied to efficiency and to teamwork, no longer can you just be better because you chose the right feats/combo.

Arakasius wrote:

See to me a game where one player sits on their butt for months doing nothing and then becomes the focus for months or vice versa is kind of a big problem. That’s not balance that’s just a bad game. Like said above there was a reason 5-8 or so was the best, in that spot when casters got third level spells til when caster invalidated the party. PF2 decided that spot should be where the game resides. Every player at all levels should be able to equally contribute and PF1 makes that impossible by design.

Is the DM not giving the less combat-capable PCs spotlight in the RP segments? These games aren't just combat and rolling dice, and that's where you can let the player whose character hasn't yet peaked in their build shine.

Did a PF1 fighter have any non combat abilities? Most of them due to 8 int barely had any skills. They certainly weren’t using feats for skill increases. A PF1 fighter or barbarian or most other martials could basically maybe do at most one non combat thing and generally it was something like intimidate or a str based skill. Casters often had more skill increases on top of spells that could reproduce skills. So sure you could I suppose give a PF1 martial something to do outside of combat provided they didn’t have to roll for it. Because with their stat arrays and limited skills they couldn’t succeed in anything.

So that is another thing PF2 does much better by separating feats. We all know no one took skill feats in PF1 so putting them in their own bucket means a lot less cookie cutter builds. The fact that there isn’t really a zeniths guide to PF2 is a good thing because you can build what you want and know even if you make some poor choices you can still contribute. Optimizers can do better but they won’t be too much ahead of the rest.

That is the truth in the end and only Paizo knows those numbers. But by my anecdotal evidence most people I knew quit because they wanted a game they could just sit down and play instead of invest in. They still wanted to get together and have game nights they just didn’t want to play PF1. So we switched to 5e or just played board games. And when PF2 came out and I tried to get them to switch back the taint of PF1 was too much. They just wouldn’t give Paizo the benefit of the doubt in making a game you could just play. They had already been burned.

See to me a game where one player sits on their butt for months doing nothing and then becomes the focus for months or vice versa is kind of a big problem. That’s not balance that’s just a bad game. Like said above there was a reason 5-8 or so was the best, in that spot when casters got third level spells til when caster invalidated the party. PF2 decided that spot should be where the game resides. Every player at all levels should be able to equally contribute and PF1 makes that impossible by design.

Actually the baseball analogy goes really well if you take it further. Some people just want to see a game played with a pitcher throwing, a batter hitting and fielders making great plays. But just like PF1 baseball has been destroyed in the modern day by optimizers. First the players/teams optimized. They brought the shift, they brought steroids and sticky stuff. They pushed the rules with sign stealing. When things got banned they found new things to push. Then the league (DMs) responded. They banned innovations, they tinker with changes to the game such as runners on in extras, restricting the shift, banned substance uses, etc. This is the DM curating the game. Then the players respond again and it’s an endless back and forth.

But guess what people want to watch baseball want to see hits and defence and fun. Similarly to PF players. They just want to play games with friends without it being an investment. They want to be able to choose their own feats without being told what is the best to take by the party expert. I have been a part of too many group building experiences in PF1. The experts choose their fun toy to destroy the campaign and then tell their less experienced friends the feats they need to take to compete.

It’s a lot of investment that only pays off when the party is of equal skill and is backed up by a DM willing to do that work. Nothing is stopping you from playing that game anymore but I would guess most switched because their friends abandoned PF1 and it’s hard to play a group game by yourself. And in the end they’re playing a solo game in a group setting just really doesn’t work and it’s why most of the people I played PF with years ago quit.

Verdyn you can say the same thing about baseball. Now it’s my favorite sport to follow but there is a reason that it’s falling behind in audience and that it’s not attracting new fans. The game just like PF1 has a huge barrier to entrance. You have to do a ton of research and if you DM the work required is immense. It’s a lot of slow work for some nice payoff but in this day and age attention spans are shorter.

A game needs to be easy to get in and easier to run and PF1 falls flat on its face for that. 5e is quite good for that but has almost no customization. PF2 allows a middle ground which makes it attractive to people who want that PF experience but are burned out on the original. Baseball as well can be a wonderful game but like PF1 is also a dinosaur that has fallen out of favour because for the few times you can get that amazing close game most of the time you get four hour slogs filled with commercials and pitching changes and strike outs.

The problem Malleus with that game is that almost no one played it. There is a reason in PF1 that most parties stopped by level 7, most short form campaigns were made for low levels, PFS capped early, etc. PF1 can be a wonderful game when played between players of similar skill and dedication backed up by a DM willing to do a bunch of work. But that’s a very high bar to clear and most games stopped at seven or below for all the scaling issues PF1 had. Someone said it earlier in the thread but they figured out the most desired PF1 feel was heroic and leaned in on that. They cut out the high end and all the problems it caused.

Your points on murder machines and grumbling about inequality of casters/martials just shows you don’t get it or were in that 1% lucky enough to find the perfect group of like minded folk. That ability to create the murder machine ties directly into the inequality of players at the table which sinks most games. It is a group game after all and casters ability to dominate the game and invalidate most other classes was a huge failing of PF1. Sorry you don’t get to feel like a god but generally that just ended up with you feeling godlike while the rest of your group checked their phone or wondered why they were even wasting their time playing.

Yeah PF1 is a great game once we curate out the half dozen broken or useless classes, another 1-2 dozen OP archetypes and about 50-100 feats or spells across the game. After that it’s mostly fine other than a whole bunch of warts like static combats (full attack issues), combat maneuvers, overly complex rules and so on.

Pathfinder 1 is like nuclear treaties. Everything sorta works if everyone respects the balance. Like if everyone agrees that random stuff and whatever sounds cool is good then it’s okay because you can play with a bunch of crap feats. Or if everyone just plays with decent/good stuff it similarly works. If everyone optimizes to extreme levels then it can work but the DM has their job cut out for them. It’s extremely difficult for them to balance PC nova tactics without stepping into being an antagonist DM that is meta gaming against your parties OP combos. Which is what DF says. When I DMd even with level 10ish party I had to specifically make encounters that could live long enough to not get crushed but not do enough damage to wipe them out.

But that goes back to the first point, the party has to agree to stay at similar power levels. And that almost never works either because the one guy who takes random feats or the couple who found Zeniths guide and took all the gold feats. Just like nuclear deterrence once the first person breaks it the game breaks. Players get upset that they’re useless or just become spectators. Players get smug and dominate the game, GM suddenly has to balance a game with players of wildly different capabilities. It’s an unwritten contract that has to be followed for campaigns to work and every one I’ve ever been involved in failed for that reason in the end.

I agree PF1 has more room for player customization but it always fails because the inter party dynamics and how poorly the DM/Party dynamics with difficulty scales past level 9 or so. If you can get a DM willing to do the work and a party willing to agree to that contract PF1 can be amazing but that almost never happens.

On the pure quality of life side on the PF2 side I think having skills and saves be able to be rolled in the same scale as attacks/defenses and the three action system are the biggest game changers PF2 brings.

This thread should just get closed. Any comments on not starting a flame/bash war on editions was pointless at the start since the question was inevitably going to start it. We’ve had this discussion a hundred times before with no point to it. Just use the search function and read one of the previous closed threads.

Not that we have a bard in our game but tbh if someone wanted to play it I think I would do two things.

1. Give wave casting instead of full casting.
2. Give some sort of mechanism to improve physical accuracy. It might be just give them master there but maybe give them master accuracy to hit on turns they do a composition or something.

I still think Bard would be a very powerful class but it would promote a better playstyle than what they have now which is pretty static.

Geez this is tedious. Just flag and move on it’s not worth arguing.

I don’t see why Summoner wouldn’t evoke what we have. Most people thinking of that would think of Final Fantasy and a summoner there is a magic user that summons some big scary monster from an alternate plane/world and then fights alongside it. Basically Yuna. And PF2 summoner works perfectly for that.

Ofc it should. Pathfinder 2 is a direct response to the lessons they learned from PF1. There was a balance between casters and martials in PF1. It was decided it wasn’t a fair balance and they made a new balance point where martials got more unique things that casters couldn’t coop through spells.

I’d consider four stat boosts in general to be more important than one feat. Two stat boosts to me is probably the break even point but now I can’t be optimized at my int/cha skills. That could be like 2-3 to knowledge checks or diplomacy/intimidation along with other benefits. If you are an archer who plans on making multiple attacks a round you definitely want one of the options that pushed the damage up, whether it be propulsive or extra damage dice. It’s not like you are going to find many feats out there that are going to boost your pure damage numbers.

You overrate what one feat will give you when plenty of classes and builds don’t have must have options. If you are one of the players who doesn’t care for a ton of options and just wants to push the attack button it’s a reasonable choice that increases your damage. I see you listed 3 different archetype options as your feats well the rules are that you really can’t multidip unless you take that one half elf trait. This is what I see with my players they take one multiclass archetype and maybe one other thing in that archetype they want and then stop because they don’t want to put more in there to qualify for a second.

Heck comparing to PF1 there were a lot of builds that gave up feats or class options to go up one damage dice on their weapons, and feats in PF1 were generally more scarce a resource. This is one of the few ways to do the same in PF2.

No not all classes are starved for feats. I have players in my game who don’t generally have a great option to take when levelling. You can’t make blanket statements like that since for some classes feats matter a lot more than others. Since most feats in this game just give more options not power there are plenty of builds with space to include an extra feat or two.

And yes I know that at minimum it requires one feat to make it work. I don’t think a feat is worth more than four stat boosts and a dice step in all circumstances. (Yes there is deadly but range and no volley also balance that) If you are a character that wants to be a party face or spec in demoralize or have an odd hankering for more knowledge skills it’s not a bad trade off. It’s certainly not a trade off worth the hyperbole shown in this thread. You generally only have one floating stat boost since dex/wis/con are generally musts to boost and of the remaining three strength really has only one good usage.

So take unconventional weaponry then and the feat cost is lessened although that forces you to human.

Anyway a Daikyu with the same point blank feat is still superior to a shortbow as the weapon now is 1d8+2. Sure if you want to pump strength to 18 then sure composite is good but that could be four stat boosts going to something more useful than strength. Yes the deadly on bows can be useful but it’s just inferior to the bigger damage die you get.

Like I agree it’s not the best use ever but I hardly see the outrage. Look at the list Exorcist posted. The bonuses the Daikyu give you are way more relevant than most advanced weapons. Is it worth the feats? Maybe I haven’t done all the maths but going up a damage dice has benefits and there is absolutely benefits to never having to pump strength a mostly useless stat. Some builds are starved for feats and some are starved for stats. I wouldn’t take this if I was the first but I would consider it for the second.

Like I I was a human that had no plans to take fighter or archer I’d use a feat for this from ancestry and use my stats for something else. (Likely to either invest in Cha or Int). Most fights in the early game take place within thirty feet and most fights late game feature enemies with such extremely mobility that you usually can’t get out of 30 feet range.

I think people showed that already here provided the reload thing is a typo.

Higher base damage then shortbow and no short range penalty and allows a build to not devote anything to strength. Sure crits matter but hits come up a lot more often in gameplay. Wasn’t it already shown up threat that it beat a shortbow? Lots of builds have room for a feat or two. This one unlike most actually does get a numerical advantage from the higher base damage.

Doesn’t Advance Weapon Training or Advancd Bow Training get rid of the proficiency issue? (Provided you had martial proficiency in bows) Maybe I’m missing something here. Obv you don’t take this unless you take one of those feats.