Frankly, it's a lot of rigmarole just to make the stat generation technically random but effectively ensuring high stats in some (if not most) abilities. Point buy with tighter limits, or choosing from arrays, accomplishes the same thing faster, easier, and without the chance that one player gets a monster statline under a generous rolling scheme.
Game mechanics aside, why is there even a Bastard Sword in the game? It's literally a Longsword IRL. They're the same weapon... And why is Studded Leather still around?
Name me one fantasy novel where they do this. Heck I’ve read my share of forgotten realms books (as well as the original Dragonlance) and even there they didn’t. I’m sure Raistlin would be really badass if he buffed Caramon with multiple spells before every battle. Prebuffing is a joke and I’m glad it’s been curtailed. In the Black Company novels, every powerful wizard is protected at all times by many-layered defensive spells that are presumably cast ahead of time off-screen.
I've only been playing RPGs for about ten years and I don't like the idea of 3.x Wands either. The fastest way to take something literally magical and suck all the wonder out of it is to make it disposable.
Wizards / Prepared Casters canonically using Vancian (or Arcanist "soft Vancian") casting while Sorcerers / Spontaneous Casters run entirely on Spell Points could be fun.
In case you have not noticed this is what's been going on in the past 2 years with people leaving Pathfinder for 5e. PF2e needed to come out a year ago, but they needed to finish Starfinder first, which is opinionated, but still a success, mainly for the fact that there are no competitors in the sci-fi niche. It's not too late to fight back before 5e gets the whole pie and the only way to do it is to provide feedback so PF2e can become better. It won't change dramatically of course and why should it? It has some excellent ideas. It need work and tuning, sure. We need to help.What is gone forever is the option to keep the status quo. Revolution is coming, be it one way or another, I feel. Starfinder has sci-fi competitors in Shadowrun, 40k, and of course Star Wars.
Low fantasy, in its current meaning, is for low-level characters. If you don't want your game to leave that feeling behind, cap your PCs at level 6. Maybe PF2 can even devote a little sidebar to the E6 variant rules (essentially capping character level at 6 and making additional XP go towards feats). I think such tiers of play (e.g. Gritty < Heroic < Mythic) are a good idea, unfortunately 4th edition did it and even its good ideas are considered bad by association. Casters don't have to get their spells nerfed to the ground, or be saddled with unfun chores to be reined in. They just need to have their spell lists tightly restricted along thematic lines: Specialist Wizards don't get extra spells of their chosen school, they get only spells of their chosen school (with perhaps a limited ability to learn spells from one other school), and there are no Universalists. Sorcerers can only choose from Bloodline spells, Clerics can only choose from Domain spells, and so on.
Regarding 4e's financial success or lack thereof: I think it speaks volumes that WotC laid off key staff (including 4e lead designer Rob Heinsoo) every year from 4e's launch in 2008 to the beginning of 5e's development in 2012.Chris Sims and Jennifer Clarke Wilkes went in 2015 and there have been others since, so it's hardly as if the process hasn't continued into the 5e years. Which rather speaks volumes about how little the success or failure of the product has on layoffs at WotC. Rob Heinsoo was let go a year after 4e's launch, whereas Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford still have their jobs. In general you don't lay off a lead designer if the product was good, if for no other reason than because he might go work for a competitor. Chris Sims was laid off during 4e's run as well, rehired later and laid off again after 5e's launch. 5e has a much slower release schedule than PF or previous D&D editions, in spite of its success, hence they have fewer staff. That may in turn be a sign of WotC/Hasbro holding the D&D department's purse strings tighter after 4e.
Regarding 4e's financial success or lack thereof: I think it speaks volumes that WotC laid off key staff (including 4e lead designer Rob Heinsoo) every year from 4e's launch in 2008 to the beginning of 5e's development in 2012.That's a non-argument, since 5e, which is crazy successful, is done by a small team that's a fraction of the 3.5e team. And that's a complete non-sequitur. Are you claiming that layoffs at WotC for 4e's entire run are unrelated to its financial success or failure?
Regarding 4e's financial success or lack thereof: I think it speaks volumes that WotC laid off key staff (including 4e lead designer Rob Heinsoo) every year from 4e's launch in 2008 to the beginning of 5e's development in 2012.
I care less about the historical naming than just the goofiness of certain weapon properties. Longswords can't pierce, short swords can't cut, but daggers can do both? What the f%%@ is that?
Who cares, apart from few people who spent too much time at Ren Faires, SCA meetings or a military history PhD? Or those insufferable nerds who play too many pen & paper RPGs?
Or is he Lawful Good because he fights in the name of the rightful king, Richard, against the usurper Prince John? He resorts to guerilla tactics simply because those are the means that remain to him when he returned from Crusade to find his land seized by the corrupt Sheriff.
Definitions of Good, Evil, Honor, etc. are rarely given because the chance of getting something wrong approaches 100%. Philosophers can't come up with a final answer that can't be poked full of holes, so what are the odds that some game designers will hit upon the solution? Too broad and you don't account for corner cases. Too specific and it's vulnerable to self-contradiction and inconsistency, or to being gamed (e.g. "my Paladin didn't lie, he merely implied an untruth!"). And, not that I think Paizo would do it, there's a chance to get things really wrong and make your system of morality a complete joke: Just look at the Book of Exalted Deeds and Book of Vile Darkness. One reason alignment is so contentious is that the idea of actions being Good or Evil intrinsically, regardless of intent or consequences, is so far removed from most people's moral sense (how many strict deontologists do you know?) that it's deeply unsatisfying even in a fictional world. Morality in Golarion is informed by culture—that of the authors—and while most of us belong to it, many of us will not agree with them about everything. It breaks immersion whenever it contradicts itself, which will happen constantly in a setting whose fluff and rules have many different authors. Additionally, the enormous implications of alignment being a universal physical quantity are never taken to their conclusion. Partly because it's a ton of work to figure out how civilization and culture would develop in such a different world, and partly (I suspect) because it would result in a very different and much less fun setting in which culture is irrelevant. That is how morality in Golarion, and under the alignment system in general, works—and why I would rather get rid of it. What is balance in a game where the context has nearly infinite possibilities? What are we "balancing?" XP per hour? Gold per hour? Damage per attack? Average change to get hit? Balance in a complex game is not simple, but it's real, and achievable. Possibilities are infinite, but some possibilities are far more possible than others. I think the best metric is the Same Game Test, which is essentially a measure of ability to handle a wide variety of challenges.
I never advocated killing innocents. I don't know how you even thought that was a thing. Because if you once allow Paladins to use poison, what's to stop them from dousing a city in nerve gas? /s PF2 Paladins should be prohibited from using daggers, because of their traditional association with duplicity, deception, and skullduggery, not to mention their association with cultish ritual.
Exactly. The Paladin need only be a proverbial, not literal, Knight in Shining Armor. Ultimately their fighting style is mere detail: They may be martial artists, lithe fencers, righteous gunslingers, or hunters keeping vigil in the wilderness.
1. I think Survival's close association with hunting is enough on its own to encompass tracking. Surviving in the wilderness, especially one full of creatures as deadly as fantasy worlds always seem to have, is more serious business than camping. 2. Sure, Tracking is a minor ability in the grand scheme of what the game's characters are capable of. But that's partly because it'd get monotonous to have players constantly in the sort of specific situations where Tracking would be useful, and partly because the game eventually introduces magical means both to find creatures and to deny Tracking. 3. Aragorn isn't a Druid because, among many other reasons, he's not a spellcaster. And what I mean by "similar" in this case is that the Ranger and Druid are empowered by nature, just as the Cleric and Paladin are empowered by divinity, the Wizard and Magus are empowered by the arcane. The difference between those sets of classes is the degree to which each is a spellcaster. Not having spells (or not having as many spells) requires the character, from a game design standpoint as well as because it's a good idea in-universe, to possess greater martial prowess and adeptness with mundane skills if they want to keep up. Incidentally, that's one reason the Fighter deserves more skills and a better ability to use them. And unless the Druid is some kind of prodigy, being a Druid must involve living and surviving in nature, and having done so for a long period in which they could not simply magic such problems away. That wilderness apprenticeship heavily implies investment in Survival, and therefore expertise in hunting, and in tracking. And the Barbarian is similar to the Fighter, in the sense that the former relies on rage and pure strength of body and will. And possibly, but not necessarily, a connection to the nature theme. The latter relies on skill as well as physical prowess, and is more or less a blank slate otherwise. IIRC the Barbarian started as a class kit for the Fighter, and if we weren't constrained by tradition dictating that Barbarian be its own class, I would say it would function perfectly well as a Fighter archetype. What is lost on so many is that as a designer, you don't want the perfect class. You don't want players to be 100% satisfied with any class. There needs to be some, if not several, deficiencies with each class that makes players think the grass is greener on another class. What's more, the deficiencies need to create design space for other aspects of the game, including the need to team-up and the desire to try a different class to get that thing you've been starved for. What are you even saying here? Obviously I don't want any class to be able to do everything, which is why I'm in favor of tight restrictions on the Wizard spell list. Two skills, while very welcome on a class like the Fighter, isn't going to turn it into 3.5's Factotum. And I think it's been proven over the years since D&D 3rd has been around that the deficiencies have been very unevenly spread. A necessary part of fixing that is making a more skilled Fighter. If anything I would say your anecdote proves my point: You chose Barbarian over Fighter, even though you wanted a simple character to play, even though you don't like Rage, even though you believe the Fighter has its own advantages in combat over the Barbarian, and even though you went Human and didn't dump INT. The takeaway is taht Fighter isn't fun because it's good at too few things. It doesn't have to be good at everything, nor should it be, but it has to be good at more than that. A class can be fun without being good at everything, it just has to be good at enough things. That's good game design. Making excuses for deficiencies by calling them features is not. I would add that the Fighter being skilled in so few areas is in its own way a blow to verisimilitude. If you want to be a Mundane Fighting Man getting stuck in with the multiverse's big boys, you had better be a past master of getting things done without magic. That's why one quick-and-dirty fix to both the Fighter and the Rogue is to gestalt them together, and in a way it's fitting: Again, the Thief should never have been split off into its own class to begin with.
For what it's worth, I almost always play Human, and I never dump INT below 10, on any class. 2 skill ranks are nevertheless still welcome. The Fighter shouldn't have to sacrifice any combat effectiveness for a better use of some skills. They get those bonus combat feats as a substitute for actual class features. That's why PF1's Barbarian blasts PF1's Fighter right out of the water, and not just for damage. Paizo—the professional game designers—seem to agree, which is why the Unchained Barbarian was almost wholly a nerf and the Fighter's Advanced Weapon & Armor training grants, among many other things, more skills. Since were being blunt, I'd say you need to pull your head out. Like so many on these forums, you're only focused on what you want, "me me me me." Players, by and large, think games are "balanced" when the characters they like to play are the strongest. You think I'm taking a pot shot, but it's the ever-lovin truth. That's right, because the average player doesn't think holistically or globally, they focus on what they aren't getting and block out arguments on why the game is better off if they don't get it. Horse s#&~, and I hope I never become as embittered toward players as you apparently have. I rarely, if ever play Fighter because I find it boring in and out of combat—just as you did. I post what I do as often as I do because I want the game to be the best game it can be, and to succeed. A part of that involves a better role for the Fighter than "guy who's good at fighting and precious little else". Are you accusing me of arguing in bad faith because I want my pet class to get buffs? F+$@ your hat.
Paladin threads in a nutshell.
Elric was sworn to Chaos, but his behaviour was not always chaotic, and he had his own moral compass/code (hence not fitting in with his people). Most characters, even in settings that have alignment, don't slot neatly into one alignment. As far as classifying actions, you can't even start until you agree on whether to categorize them based on intent, results, or if the actions themselves are Good, Evil, Lawful, or Chaotic.
That's the first thing he came in and said, in a thread directly named: "What Would A CG Paladin Code Look Like?" and with his past history on these topics, yeah..... >.> And then he moved onto making an Argument that Specifically swayed in the favor of Law, without Ever trying to Actually Talk about what a Chaotic Good Champion, should have. Very strange indeed, for someone who likes to start threads with a supercilious litany of rules. And again, I don't think a code is inherently Lawful: - Cavaliers have Codes (many of which are compatible with a non-Lawful alignment), and no alignment restriction.
Paladin is already much more Good than Lawful. They radiate an aura of Good, not Law. They detect and smite Evil, not Chaos. Good tenets are a higher priority than Lawful ones in the PF2 Paladin's Code, as well they should be.
Too late to edit the last post. I should add that I'm not against restrictions in general. For example, I'd like casters' spell lists to be much more heavily restricted along logical and thematic lines. I'm against restrictions that aren't justifiable with in-universe logic, because they damage verisimilitude. Why shouldn't Survival include the ability to follow tracks, other than to ensure that only people with Ranger levels can do it? Why such a hard separation between Ranger and Druid when ultimately they're very similar conceptually, just on different sides of the Martial/Caster spectrum (on which classes like Barbarian, Rogue, or even Fighter might fit at the far Martial end). And to be perfectly blunt, get f%*%ing real: Two more skills aren't going to make the Fighter start stepping on the Ranger or Barbarian's toes, never mind that the Fighter isn't actually better at fighting than the Barbarian. You want to talk about vocal minorities? I've never seen anyone else claim that the Fighter would have too much out-of-combat utility at 4+INT skill ranks per level. You heard it here first: Dump INT and CHA down to 7 and pour your entire customization budget into combat ability. It's not min/maxing, it makes for a better roleplay experience because there are fewer things you can do.
Roleplaying predates Niche Protection (which was invented in order to justify the Thief class), and rules in general.
Chaos has its own set of principles and prohibitions: Chaotic Evil Antipaladins and alignment-agnostic Cavaliers have Codes of Conduct, Chaotic deities have Anathema, and a hypothetical Chaotic Good Paladin has only to switch out his lowest-priority tenet (rather than uphold authority, uphold individual freedom). Not caring WRT Law/Chaos makes you Neutral, not Chaotic. Chaos has rules. If it seems contradictory, well, that's alignment for you.
Fighter being completely mundane is both the point and the problem. If high-level casters are going to be what they are, then high-level martials need to be Wuxia-type characters. Mundane Fighting Man is a low-level concept for low-level games and/or low-magic settings. Likewise, Batman either needs non-superpowered opposition, or gadgets that effectively turn him into a superhero.
There is nothing within the code to prohibit the gathering of information. Maybe ignorance is the wrong word for it, but simplicity and detachment are held to be virtues by religions from Catholicism to Hinduism. The idea, broadly speaking, is to recapture the innocence (i.e. simplicity, guilelessness, and total absence of worldly concern) of childhood.
As of PF2, Lawful Good is not required to "fight fair" against Evil, because the highest priority in the Paladin code is "do no evil" and the second-highest is "protect the innocent". Honor, fairness, and truth rank only at bronze. When lives are at stake, only a fool or a desperate man fights without every advantage available to him. When innocent lives are at stake, Good characters may avail themselves of any and all advantages that do not require them to commit an evil act.
I think a Paladin would consider a million lives more important than his personal honor and powers, and would press the proverbial button even at the cost of falling.I do not think a Paladin would, well they could, but they would fall. It is supposed to be part of what makes a Paladin a Paladin. The Paladin doesn't not do evil to keep his powers, a Paladin believes that not doing evil is right, that not doing evil is more important than those lives. That is what it takes to be a Paladin. And that's a far more narrow and rigid view of how to play The One True Way than many people hold, even among the Paladin's fans. Of course Paladins don't refrain from doing evil in order to keep their powers, but for them the act must be a sort of spiritual martyrdom: Sacrificing one's soul, rather than one's life, for the greater good. And what kind of Paladin would realistically weigh the moral cost of one evil act against killing three Absaloms and an Oppara and decide the world's better off with the latter? Or that he, with his divine backing and martial prowess, would gamble on his ability to get the job done the hard way? What is that if not vanity? [Atonement] is a possibility, yes, though unlikely. There are a whole lot of reasons that wouldn't exactly work so well. It would require a high level Cleric to do the atonement, then the Paladin would have to be willing to lie about what happened. It opens a can of worms that makes it a very unlikely series of events. Regardless, it supposes a lot of things that aren't immediately clear: One, that characters in-universe are as rigidly delineated by class as they are in the rules (and "RAW ≡ Lore" is dangerous territory that opens up some major cans of worms indeed). Two, that most people can actually tell if a Paladin's powers have disappeared or not. Three, the phrase "until you demonstrate your repentance by conducting an atone ritual" seems to imply that the Paladin can atone by himself, without the aid of a high-level Cleric.
So why is a Chaotic reflection of the Paladin not possible while a Lawful reflection of the Antipaladin is? Once again, most of what a Paladin is doesn't come from Law, it comes from Good. He radiates Good, not Law, and he detects and smites Evil, not Chaos. Save for, I do not believe that following a code that they didn't personally write is a chaotic thing to do. I do not feel, for a second, that a Chaotic Good would not violate the code if to do so meant saving someone. Period. Under the PF2 Code's priority system—for Lawful Good—the only tenet that takes precedence over saving innocents is not doing evil. A champion of Chaotic Good still wouldn't do evil to save innocents unless, again, the stakes were so high that he'd be willing to sacrifice his very soul to save them. That doesn't depend on Law or Chaos, that comes from Good, at least in my book—I'm sure yours says differently. Isn't alignment fun? On top of that, Clerics of Chaotic gods agree to a lot of rules as a condition to gain their power, and if they can do it, then more martially-oriented champions can as well. I do not believe that you are going to be able to convince me to come to your side on this, in this matter I have given enough thought that I cannot be moved. It would require you to change an outlook that I believe strongly in and have for my entire life about a class I have had a personal attachment to for 29 years. My first character ever in D&D was a Paladin. I was drawn to it then, I am drawn to it now. Neither do I, which is why I made the other comment:
Again, it's just a possibility. In just about any given group of people, many more will listen or read silently than will speak.
In other words, it's okay for some things to be mechanically similar to the Paladin. And Antipaladins can run the gamut of Evil so why can't their opposite number run the gamut of Good?
It's not like there's not precedent for what we want. I think having different oaths which start new class feat chains within the same class build up is the perfect solution. It's well-documented in studies that, in general, beliefs held emotionally will almost never be swayed by argument or evidence. For topics like this, I rarely hold any hope that the other side will be swayed by anything I say. The point is to influence people who are on the fence, who could very well be developers.
The thing is, the Black Ops idea doesn't work with Paladins. Above all else they *cannot* do a single evil act. That is, again, why Hellknights are probably preferred by governments. The Hellknight will follow orders no matter what. The Paladin will tell a King to shove off if they tell them to do something evil. They won't even do evil to save a million people. I think a Paladin would consider a million lives more important than his personal honor and powers, and would press the proverbial button even at the cost of falling. "The Paladin can do no evil. This is a complete and total hardline stance. So if someone is claiming that the Paladin did something evil and he still has his powers, then we know the person is wrong." He could have received Atonement in that time. The powers come with that name. The idea is that there isn't supposed to be something similar to the Paladin. The Paladin is the Paladin and nothing else is a Paladin. Nothing else has the powers of the Paladin. They are singular and unique. Antipaladins have most of the same abilities, albeit with Good penciled out and replaced with Evil. How close can some other class be to a Paladin, mechanically, without getting too close and therefore killing it? Several pages back, I outlined a hypothetical Code of Honor for a Chaotic Good Paladin analogue. As it turned out, the only tenet that really needed to be changed was the lowest-priority rule (uphold individual liberty rather than legitimate authority).
I hope this does not derail but I had a thought. For the people who wish to lighten/remove the alignment restrictions from the Paladin, does that mean you also wish to remove the alignment restrictions from Druids and Barbarians? Yes. Neither makes a lot of sense when you think about it. I mean I sometimes wish the names were different. Paladin=sounds cool. Anti-Paladin...sounds kind of dorky. I mean Tyrant is a cool name for a LE pally. Hellknight would of been a cool name for an evil paladin thing but that is taken by something else. Paladin, Paragon, Liberator Judicator, ???, AnarchTyrant, Blackguard, Despoiler What would the codes be? I mean LG we have, LE and CE we have also. What kind of codes could you have for a CG? I posted one earlier in this thread, essentially switching the mandate from "uphold legitimate authority" to "uphold individual freedom". There was some debate over whether it should still include honor, fairness, and honesty, which petered out with the argument that fairness and honesty are Good rather than Lawful, and honor is preached by Chaotic deities too. What kind of codes can you have for a Neutral? Uphold the balance of the cosmic forces (i.e. the other alignments). That one's an especially tough sell because, though most people agree that balance between Law and Chaos is the best way to go, there's no compelling reason Good and Evil should be in balance with each other.
I feel it worth mentioning that being honorable is one of the central tenets of Khorne's worship. An (extremely) evil god of Chaos who cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it flows. Alignment, ladies and gentlemen.
I don't think the ability to heal the injured and the sick is particularly well aligned with the themes of evil and evil gods in general, though.Yes, Lay on Hands / Mercy doesn't belong on the Paladin's evil counterparts.Even that's not true anymore, since now alignment is no longer connected to positive or negative energy with evil gods now being able to providing healing powers to their clerics instead of harm powers. Now that Positive & Negative Energy no longer have alignment connotations, I can see an Antipaladin learning to channel positive energy purely to heal himself, but then how does one learn to use it only on himself without learning in the process how to use it on others? One can easily imagine a Blackguard using it to heal minions and useful allies, or to show the crowd he's a benevolent miracle worker, etc. Likewise, a Paladin might learn to channel negative energy in order to Smite Evil all the harder, but I think most would opt for the healing ability. Aside from anything else, Paladins fight undead a lot, whereas Antipaladins don't actually have much ability to raise or control undead (being weak or non-spellcasters), and most Antis are much more closely bound up in theme and mechanics with evil outsiders than undead. This is a 100% lawful tenet - honor is one that is on a solid amount of LG deities, and a few LN or LE ones...while not at all on any NG or CG ones. Fair enough, though I would argue fairness (i.e. not cheating or taking advantage) is a Good trait rather than a Lawful one, and Chaotic Good must therefore uphold fairness in all things—except when it's overruled by a higher tenet in the Code. When lives are at stake, neither Chaotic nor Lawful Good are forced to "fight fair" against Evil, but likewise neither are allowed to employ Evil means (murder, torture, etc.) even in the name of the greater good. And I'm not sure whether, under Pathfinder's cosmology, lying is an Evil act or "merely" a Chaotic one.
On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens argued that totalitarianism, which is often described as systematic, is actually bound up with caprice. The rules change constantly so that people can never be sure whether they're following the latest rule or not, and the tyrant's changeable whim at any given moment is the highest law. Frankly I think most things (characters, actions, etc.) are too complicated to slot neatly into an alignment system. Even with the system outlined in the Escapist article linked above, one has to agree with the premises before they can start classifying things. They sound mostly reasonable to me, but if alignment is a fundamental force of nature in a given setting then it would seem, for example, that motivation and intent don't matter. Therefore the Lawful/Deontological approach is the only "correct" one for Golarion. And that leads to all sorts of weirdness and deformity, such that it's deeply dissatisfying to most players (as it always is when their morals clash with the ones that they're told are correct in-setting) and to people in general (no one in the real world is a strict deontologist).
So I have trouble envisioning what the hypothetical CG-adin would even be. Putting aside "the champion of a deity which happens to be CG" since that's the Warpriest's provenance not the Paladin's, I think I might have an idea. Because it'll be easier to make Clerics and Wizards good at combat, the Warpriest's role (a divine caster who spends some of his 'customization budget', as it were, on combat rather than spellcasting) may be subsumed into the Cleric class. Just as we may not need a Magus class if it's doable with a Wizard, we may not need a Warpriest class if it's doable with a Cleric. So the LG Paladin is someone who always does good, but in a Lawful way. Whereas the LE Tyrant is someone who establishes order over everything, but does so in as evil a way as possible. A normal CE Antipaladin is someone who always does evil, in the most chaotic way possible. So similar to how the Paladin and Antipaladin are inverses, I feel like the CG-adin should be the inversion of the Tyrant, someone who always pursues Chaos- but not willing to stoop to evil means to tear down whatever their target is. Sure, and as I've said the Chaotic Good champion—whatever you want to call him—doesn't have fewer rules than the traditional LG Paladin, he has different ones. For example, the Liberator's code may be: - You must never willingly commit an evil act, such as murder, torture, or casting an evil spell. (Good)
I think it's informative in itself that the only part of the code that needs to be changed is one tenet, and the lowest-priority one at that. Just, please don't call it a Paladin. I wonder just how much of this intractable debate boils down to squabbling over the name, and the status of Core versus Splat. My personal preference would be for the Champion of Chaos class to be a spellcaster, not a warrior, but that's neither here nor there. The spellcaster space is already occupied by the Cleric. There ought to be a martial counterpart, which would be the Liberator (CG) and Antipaladin (CE). The thing is, none of what the Paladin does mechanically is restricted to Lawful alignments aside from [Law] spells, and it sounds like the PF2 Paladin won't have conventional spellcasting. Maybe the LG Paladin can have a Litany of Order while his CG counterpart has a Litany of Freedom. Yes, Lay on Hands / Mercy doesn't belong on the Paladin's evil counterparts. But Aura of Good, Detect Evil, and Smite Evil belong to the whole Good row and have nothing to do with the Lawful column. More generally, being good at wearing armor and hitting things with a weapon doesn't depend on alignment at all. And I hate to keep pounding on it but it keeps having to be mentioned: It's not going to destroy the setting to have a Paladin-like class of non-LG alignments because we have three of the four corners already.
I saw your proposed version of a CG Paladin-analogue and I don't even think we're too far apart in what we want for it. Honestly, in the light of that, I think a lot of this endless argument boils down to angsting over name (whether CG Paladin gets to be called a Paladin) and "rules status" (quibbling over Paladin variants as archetypes vs. Paladin variants as core choices on a level with Cleric domains) when none of that frankly makes any functional difference.
They don't have to go away, and they're not being told to. They tell themselves that the Paladin's been ruined such that the game is unplayable. By RAW I can't play a CG Paladin in PF1, even though I'd like to. But I stick with it because I enjoy other classes, including LG Paladins. Why assume that the whole LG-Only side will consider that an instant deal-breaker just because you do?
Unknowable without a more rigorous standard of testing than "lots of people innathread". If memory serves, the straw poll from a couple of months ago showed the LG-Only side soundly beaten, but I wouldn't claim that as any sort of serious market research.
I'm a loud partisan for Paladin-analogues (i.e. with changes on a level with those between Paladin & Antipaladin) of Chaotic Good, but I understand that some character types necessarily won't make it into the Core Rulebook. Since the door's open to other champions for now, I'm fine with pushing Antipaladin, Tyrant, and Liberator back to a later iteration of the playtest, or even to the next Advanced Player's Guide. Frankly I think the new Paladin's Code (with its priority system that will hopefully eliminate Catch-22 situations) combined with their god's Anathema is enough on its own to "keep them in line", with no need for alignment. Though for what it's worth, I'm not a fan of godless divine casters in general.
Funny, alignment breaks down when I think about it, and especially when I consider that most people and fictional characters don't fit neatly into one given alignment. I don't have problems with it at the table because I just shrug and don't think about or argue it. And can we dispense with the idea that a Chaotic Good paragon has fewer rules to follow because he's Chaotic? He merely has a different set of principles. And if you want to argue that following rules makes you lawful, then Chaotic Good is actually an impossible alignment for anyone to hold, because Good necessarily involves following rules regarding restraint, charity, and so on.
If the group only sees you as competent because of your numbers, they may the ones having badwrongfun The numbers quite literally describe how competent your character is. You can't say your character is a competent fighter if he has a poor attack bonus, or a competent performer if he has a poor Perform skill. The ruthlessly Darwinian life of an adventurer would quickly put a stop to people who are bad at fighting trying to fight: Either they get killed by someone who is better at fighting, or they decide the fighting life is not for them. At a certain point I'm suspicious of people who want to play Int 11 Wizards for the roleplaying value. Why not go all the way and go Int 8 for even more adversity and therefore an even more compelling roleplay experience? After all, everyone knows that ROLEplaying and ROLLplaying are a zero-sum game and you can only gain more of the first by dumping the second. /s
Indeed, for an example here is the Anathematization of Baruch Spinoza by the rabbis of Amsterdam in 1666:
In other words, serious f**~ing business. A dire consequence for a dire crime (though the crime for which Spinoza was so excommunicated, namely heresy, is not considered a crime by most religious people nowadays and Spinoza himself is remembered as one of the fathers of liberalism). I haven't been following the thread closely so I don't know who wants Anathema to be applied to minor rules that can as such be bent once in a while. Though it is an interesting parallel that people can come to conflicting interpretations of the laws laid down in a book.
Vancian casting always struck me as the kind of highly setting-specific quirk that seems oddly out-of-place elsewhere. It'd be like if Starfinder used the FTL rules from Warhammer 40k.
Part of the premise behind the Tippyverse is that large-scale defenses against teleportation are prohibitively expensive. Even if you just need to mix in some lead with the bricks, or whatever, it'll still be difficult to protect an area larger than a city. Unless lead is extremely common in the ground or you only need tiny concentrations for it to work, in either case it would almost make eligible teleport destinations the exception rather than the rule. That may in fact be the best solution: Teleport spells can only take you to a prepared Teleport Circle.
And a lot of that went back to Paizo's orginal request of the gaming community (the same request they've made in every playest since and the one they're running for PF2): they wanted playest feedback, not theorycraft. "I created a DPR spreadheet of this attack option mechanic and found it to be mathematically inferior to this other attack action mechanic" will always get less designer attention than "I played this and I had fun." It's baked into the DNA of the playtest: play it and give us feedback. Saying "that's what Paizo asked for" is just kicking the can down the road. And can we dispense with the pseudo-wisdom that "mere theorycraft" is somehow less valuable than the results of what we can assume are not rigorous tests? Theorycrafting is the result of a playtest with an infinitely large sample size. You don't need to run experiments to find out what the rules of the world are when it's a simulated world whose rules are readily available. "My Rogue has no trouble hitting" is fairly meaningless for testing purposes. Maybe you did have trouble hitting and don't remember it, or your rolls happened to be mostly good, or the GM used lower AC enemies than usual, or, or, or. Lots of people have fun playing RIFTS or WoD, partly because playing games with your friends is fun in general, and partly because the settings of those systems are fun for many people even though mechanically the systems are tire fires. "It's not fun" is often a good indication that something's wrong, but "it's fun" is not necessarily an indication that nothing's wrong.
One accusation I've heard on other sites was that the playtest was basically a publicity stunt: People who brought criticism (e.g. the core Rogue being too weak), and produced facts & figures to back it up, were ignored. In contrast, people who said things like "Rogue is fine because I had fun playing it" were used as evidence that everything was going well.
I think the remaining blogs should be moneyized. Whichever topic gets the most donations should be the next blog. That will tell us which is really the most popular. What if Saudi princes just happen to love playing Druids?
The relevant part—the part that
Respecting someone's authority is synonymous with obeying it, otherwise what does it even mean?
Classes are so much more than their mechanics alone. Of course they are. Their mechanics are not sufficient but they are necessary. Classes have both unique powers and unique lore. To change entirely their lore *is* to destroy the class. They're an entire package, and should be treated as such Adding some Chaotic Good archetype for or Alternative Class to the Paladin isn't changing the lore entirely, let alone destroying the class (which is purely a matter of opinion). (Also, I don't know where people got the idea of being lawful meaning "must obey the local lord at all times"). From the line that "a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority". Define legitimate, define respect, cue arguments.
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