Helmic's page

I was always frustrated by how the mechanics of how Champion works were so overly tied to alignment - and by extension, your character's fundamental personality. The change definitely makes it more 5e-like in that it's just focusing on this one idea with enough wiggle room for interpretation.

The old method of just reflavoring champion causes to not mention alignment felt really bad and awkward as the mehcanics very clearly were signalling which of the nine alignments it's referring to, to the point of distraction like you're just lampshading it. I'm hoping the new material will have flexible enough flavor to really lean into this idea of zealous adherance to a cause as possibly coming from any number of directions, without the mechanics assuming too much about which direction that is.

Justice by its strictest sense is an interesting middle ground, because all classical alignments, (after reading more, even Neutral Evil), have a reasonable justification for caring about it to some degree or interpretation of "what is Justice".

Justice is a little annoying in that it does seem to be assuming Lawful tendencies, so not justice in that broad a sense. Liberation would probably be closer to the "justice" of the old Chaos alignment, more of the justice of the people weilded against authority rather htan the justice of the paladins that is more about defeating those that oppose a just (and usually, but now not always, benevolent) authoirty.

Is it really necessary to continuously argue against the premise of a house rule in the house rule forum? It's hard to actually iterate on the rule if people are constantly derailing it saying they don't want to play with the rule and making the OP constantly defend making the thread at all. It's a house role, just don't play with it, and let people who have more constructive things to say discuss the topic for those interested.

I have played plenty of characters who boosted 2 non-save attributes, mostly int+cha but str+cha as well. My current character, a witch, will also be pushing cha+int. It fits the character concept and that trumps everything else and that's that.

However, let's be honest here, if I could choose the attributes linked to my saves I would _never_ leave one, let alone two, of my saves lagging behind! Those saves _matter_. A lot actually. Especially as dex, con and wis seem to offer just as much as the other three even without the saves attached.

I will have fun with my witch and it will definitely not be unviable, but she will be vulnerable. It is an arbitrary cost you have to pay for some concepts but not others.

That framing might help here, as it seems the arguments against aren't actually contesting that INT and CHA are really really strong actually, but rather quibbling over the exact vernacular. That is ultimately my frustration, a player will want to do something like that and the system math makes them eat s#!@ for it for no real discernable reason.

5e seemed to sorta try to deal with this by having every attribute possibly be a save but that works out poorly. Having some other way to generate saves would probably help people have more wiggle room in chargen.

Yeah I think the objective/subjective epistomology muddles more than it clarifies, it's seeming to mostly just be about saying X is subjective therefore who can say whether game design is real or not.

For every anecdote about how XYZ 14 STR barbarian played just fine at someone's table, I think the much more common experience has been frustration. 2e is generally designed on the assumption that players care about being effective and that it feels bad to have to choose between what you want to play and what is optimal.

I think a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself that if Paizo were to actually make whatever change is being discussed, would you be willing to sit there and argue that they should change it back? If the answer is no, then I know I don't actually care about the topic, I'm relying entirely on "the game is good and any changes would suggest it's bad" knee jerking.

I fully believe people here actually actively like attributes, and would argue for their return if they didn't come back for PF3e. I find it hard to believe anyone here would sit there and tell Paizo to roll back buffs to INT or complain it got renamed. It doesn't feel like the "it's subjective" posts have a positive argument or a case for why a change would actually be bad, it mostly just seems to be demanding irrefutable scientific proof that this one change will make the game be better than going to heaven for all tablws at all times. It seems like an unreasonable standard to have to personally convince you that your relaxed home game wasn't fun before anyone can discuss balance - something Paizo already acknowledged years ago with its variant rule for alternate attributes, because they know they're highly imbalanced.

So to me, I think since a new edition is only just going to further break from the OGL, might as well not stick with Str Dex Com Wis Int Cha anyways and opt for something more deliberate.

isn't this threat more about attributes as they relate to how good they are in the game?

Its not really the place for a larger debate on whether an Int attribute in a game is ethical. That would be its own thread.

The reason I see it as relevant is that if we are going to talk about making INT less of a dump stat or attribute balance more generally, it's important to not overlook that angle and spend a bunch of time polishing something that ultimately still ends up being entirely reworked to sidestep historical issues of ableism. It won't be as easy as in Lancer where it's inhuman machines and not people, but things like renmaing attributes and shifting what they do would have balance implications while avoiding the worst associations. Or, obviously, an attributeless system does not necessarily have to have this problem at all. We can walk and chew gum here and talk about solutions to both concerns. Besides, even if I did make a separate thread, it would still get these responses and accusations, but with my name being the first thing people read in the thread. There is no way to talk about social issues without being accused of baiting on this forum, if anything this is a lot safer where we are several pages in and I don't need to worry about people coming in specifically to be mad.

Again, I'm not accusing anyone of ableism. I feel I've been really careful to phrase the criticism itself civilly. But it kimd of sucks that people who side with the status quo on this can make accusations and then get what they want by having the thread locked. I think it's very possible to bring this up productively, but it means we can't constantly debate whether it should ever be discussed at all.

Helmic wrote:

Well, no. I take the topic of ableism very seriously, and this idea of numerical general intelligence is a particular issue I take to heart. The recent Rules Lawyer video gives me a bit more confidence to push back on this "keep politics out of my fantasy game" reaction. People needed to speak up to get Pathfinder to be better on queerness and race, and it's not going to be any different for neurodivergence and mental disability.

Look I like that there is diversity here, and Paizo do support it strongly. But you are going to get a lot of people off side with evangelising. For myself I'm deliberately not watching that video just so I can ensure I can treat Ronalds content on its merits.

Again, I don't think you could get away with calling someone "evangelizing" for pointing out the problems with Torag's old lore or the issues of how orcs were depicted. Much more ketfuffle is coming from people wanting to pretend it's not there than my simply pointing out an issue that other RPG designers have spelled out as well.

I'm not going to debate whether it should be brought up at all further. I'm going to continue talking about it as it comes up and you'll just have to deal.

Helmic wrote:

I was advocating for their removal in a future game, as it sidesteps a lot of build viability issues and some of the icky bioessentialist roots of the hobby stemming from Gygax.

Let's avoid using volatile buzzwords in forum discussions. They're not conducive to a civil discussion.

Well, no. I take the topic of ableism very seriously, and this idea of numerical general intelligence is a particular issue I take to heart. The recent Rules Lawyer video gives me a bit more confidence to push back on this "keep politics out of my fantasy game" reaction. People needed to speak up to get Pathfinder to be better on queerness and race, and it's not going to be any different for neurodivergence and mental disability.

Now, I'm not saying this to mean you are an ableist for preferrimg an attributes based system. I keep using Lancer as an example as another 4e inspired game that still has attributes that behave differently and do their own interesting things, additionally without bioessentialism (which was an explicitly stated goal). I can understand why the mechanics of attributes can be something someone likes or dislikes. But I absolutely will insist that if we are going to talk about INT as an attribute, that will require us to consider the attitudes it perpetuates, just as Paizo moving away from race as a term and moving away from hardcoded ancestry bonuses and penalties were also politically concious acts. What would be actually ableist would be to deem this less worthy of real discussion than the many other social issues Paizo has put effort into better representing.

snip

It's certainly hard to communicate this. Like, our point here isn't that we don't want there to be studious barbarians or whatever build concept people here feel emotionally attached to - the point we're both making is that it sucks that that concept has some severe, lopsided tradeoffs and that it would be better if in a new edition that kind of concept was more viable. It's great if any one individual person here wants to say they played that character well and had fun, but in my experience a lot of people have not had fun playing builds with weak attacks and weak saves, they just wanted a particular personality and the system punished them for trying to mechanically represent that.

Like reading some of the arguments, it feels like some are taking this to mean we want the game to only exist as a small number of cookie cutter builds that exactly fit to stereotypes of a class, because we're (correctly) identifying that certain builds and concepts are overall less mechanically useful. But we're wanting the game to *better* permit more varied characters, by not requiring players to be OK with being worse at combat before the system permits them to make a more intellectual barbarian. And there's multiple ways that can be accomplished, such as decoupling vital stats like attack accuracy or saves from attributes or rebalancing them to make choosing between them much harder, or removing attributes and going with a feat-based replacement that buffs particular suites of skills and/or grants abilities that thematically fit with being strong or smart.

And, well, I Just don't like having INT as a stat, at all, coming from a disability justice angle. Poeple can pretend it's not IQ, but the genreal concept of attaching a number of less intelligent to more intelligent as a linear scale has some baggage. I prefer skills as a way to represent a character being well-researched or resourceful, which better reflects reality and I feel would better represent individual personalities of charcters. Finding blueberries in the bush and literal medicine keying off the same attribute is kind of silly, why can't we have a bookworm nerd emoji person be the premier doctor in the party?

To keep making comparisons to Lancer, while its skills work every differently the fact that none of the "triggers" you select actually need to have anything in common results in a lot of interesting personalities, the big tough guy who rips doors off their hinges isn't penalized for also being a hacker. A feat-based replacement for attributes in PF3e could give you a generic "strong" feat that boosts Atheletics and gives you some options for physically ripping apart structures, or a "dextrous" feat that boosts Medicine and Thievery and gives you an option to used ranged attacks to hit stationary but tiny objects from far away. You could group different feats together in different ways that might better fit a particular character concept.

I use Okular, which has the advantage of being FOSS (so it's not nagging you to buy the paid version or showing ads) and faster than many other PDF readers. It supports Paizo's buttons for its maps and form fillable character sheets just fine. For most PDF documents I prefer Zathura for its minimal, keyboard-driven interface, but for most people I think Okular's about the gold standard for a PDF reader.

I'd have to go digging into its options, but I believe it has the ability to spit out the images embedded in a PDF, I've used that in the past to import character portraits from AP's for use in Foundry, specifically Theatre Inserts as the players getting to see the NPC's face when I'm speaking as them helps a lot with everyone being able to keep track of who is who.

Ravingdork wrote:

Well in any case, I can't imagine the removal of ability attributes as being anything less than a dumbing down of the game, and so am not generally in favor of the idea.

The more mechanical layers you remove, the simpler (and more alike) characters become. Gameplay might flow better, but concepts become more limited and stand out less.

I like the complexity that allows me to play an intelligent or charismatic fighter, while also not being forced into always having herculean strength.

I'd hate to see that disappear.

How many people where calling for their complete removal? From what I could tell, most people were calling for a reduced number and/or a rebalancing. There is a lot of room between "keep ability scores just as they are" and "get rid of them entirely"

In their defense, I was advocating for their removal in a future game, as it sidesteps a lot of build viability issues and some of the icky bioessentialist roots of the hobby stemming from Gygax. But it was part of a larger recommendation to switch to a more feat-based approach to accomplish the same goal, which would likely be just about as complex but permit signifciantly more depth as you would have more meaningful choice and unique effects, especially if they're decoupled from attack accuracy (and just baking attack accuracy into class/subclass as that is effectively how 2e works anyways).

As for why I think this matters, again I find it a super common experience with new players that unless I *require* that they max their attack attribute, they often won't. It's usually not someone like Ravingdork that has a clear emotional investment in having less accuracy, when I ask I typically get an "iunno, is that bad?" or similar response, which makes me believe that it's likely a pure system mastery issue, or at least an issue of being used to systems where you are expected to sandbag if you are good at the game because optimized characters outright break the system.

And since we've already gone over why the system only has very limited wiggle room in its arrays (oustide of simply deciding you don't care about being effective), I think it would be good for general accessibility if something as vital as attack accuracy was just baked into classes. Then whether or not attributes are dropped, it stops being such an issue if a new player doesn't max out their attack stat, becuase that optimization floor is raised without meaningfully impacting the ceiling, and generally improving build variety as we stop needing attributes to align perfectly to even begin to consider a concept.

That's a nice thing about balanced systems, it means that new players have more room to just pick what looks cool or sounds good and they're not actually making things harder for themselves.

Helmic wrote:

That's the thing, there isn't actually depth. For most classes and builds, the array is +4 KAS, +3 or +2 to your save stats favoring your weakest or whatever gets secondary use in the build or class, then pick which of STR, CHA, or INT gets dumped the hardest. It is *complex*, but the depth it offers doesn't at all match up to how long the process takes. It actually punishes you for trying to play against type with a studious barbarian, by making you miss more and do less.

As long as you max your attack attribute and increase your save-attributes every 5 levels, there's really no punishment for playing whatever you want. Depending on your attack stat you have more choice, but you only need Heavy Armor Proficiency for a studious Barbarian to be perfectly playable.

Also, a +2 to a save is not important enough to end up with a one dimensional character. Actually, having more options will largely compensate the penalty to your save.

The discussion there is specifically *not* maxing out your attack stat. The studious barbarian in this case is taking a +3 to STR in order to boost INT, as their example of why my idea of not having attributes would take away depth.

It's a nonsense discussion that again just further illustrates the point that there isn't actually much meaningful choice in attibutes. Their inclusion and the labels they use will bait many players into sandbagging, thinking that maxing out their attack stat is powergaming and not maxing it makes their character more interesting.

To compare to Lancer again, Lancer has no real limitations on attributes other than a hard cap of 6. You can spend all your points on Hull if you want right from the start. Most builds do not do this because HASE, while not perfectly balanced, has each attribute do enough useful things in combat that aren't directly comparable with their own natural diminishing returns that the game does not need to force players to spread out their stats. Players just do that naturally after noticing they need more heat or having +1 Speed would be very useful.

PF2e meanwhile has an extremely involved aytribute distribution process because if you could just pump yiur points into whatever you want we would all put everything into attack. D&D style classes so lopsidedly favor one or two attributes that an chapter of the book is dedicated to obscuring that most attributes are capped, because the only way to get players to put points into most attributes is to force it.

That isn't to say I dislike the boost system, I actually am a big fan of it - but it really is only necessary because of the stark imbalances in value between attributes, that make taking less STR on a barbarian to get more INT just a bad idea rather tham a genuinely interesting tradeoff.

Helmic wrote:

Which all just further cements in my mind that I'd rather just not have attributes to begin with and avoid this stumbling block altogether.

Reducing the level of customizability by that level of magnitude would make the game a super shallow reflection of its former glory. I prefer the depth it has now.

Not every fighter should be forced to have the equivalent of 18 Strength or rogue the equivalent of 18 Dexterity. If I want a studious barbarian, or a charismatic dwarf, that should be an option.

Let us play the concepts we want, rather than forcing a bunch of cookie cutter templates based on ancestry and class.

#longliveattributes

That's the thing, there isn't actually depth. For most classes and builds, the array is +4 KAS, +3 or +2 to your save stats favoring your weakest or whatever gets secondary use in the build or class, then pick which of STR, CHA, or INT gets dumped the hardest. It is *complex*, but the depth it offers doesn't at all match up to how long the process takes. It actually punishes you for trying to play against type with a studious barbarian, by making you miss more and do less. You have to actovely sandbag to play that, you are mechanically inventivized to stick to an array that also happens to imply a particular personality.

And claiming a -1 to attack isn't a big deal but that attributes have depth is contradictory. Either the +1 you shiffle around is impactful or it isn't. I think it's very impactful on an attack stat, but I don't see that as depth as there are not many meaningful alternativr choices, the array you need is prefigured by your other buiod choices like weapons, spells, class, and feats.

It coild be replaced by any number of systems that could have far more depth, like again having feats that could make playing a studious barbarian not mean you take a significant penalty to attack, damage, and crits. Lancer sort of does this already with HASE as your attack stat, Grit, scales purely with your level and nothing else - and so as a result there are actual meaningful tradeoffs between the attributes worth considering. And Systems, the weakest attribute, is in a funky spot precisely becuase it breaks this rule to be the attack stat of hacking, making it of questionable utility to non-hackers and like INT being the domain of only those classes that are designed around it.

And so we don't have silly discussions in Lancer about how important for roleplaying reasons it is for your mech pilot to suck ass at piloting their mech and actually hitting things. It doesn't tie up attack accuracy with ephemeral concepts like being smart and likeable so nobody gets brainworms telling them to dumo Grit so that they can play as a sapient nerd emoji. You're just allowed to be smart amd take skills in things that make you smart.

RE: KAS at +3 instead of +4, the issue I find is more that new players feel pressured to take a +3 because of brainworms around "powergaming" they're bringing in from 5e or older editions. There's the Stormwind Fallacy that has a lot of players thinking that if they max out an attribute that's bad roleplaying, and so they will misinterpret discussions about how a +3 is viable as meaning they should sandbag.

So I think people should be clear what they mean by "+3 is perfectly viable" so as to not confuse players who find these discussion through Google or whatever. It is true that for 95% of builds, you should be putting a +4 in your KAS. If you're not putting a +4 in your KAS, it should be because you're playing a build that doesn't make as much use of your KAS like a Warpriest or somesuch. There are builds that do make good use of a +3.

However, you should probably not put a +3 in your KAS for "roleplaying" reasons, as 2e generally does expect a +4. "You're only behind by -1 for half your career" isn't quite accurate, the "half" is the first half and campaigns generally don't end right at level 10 or 20 on the dot - the toughest levels and your introduction to the game are the ones where you'd be behind. It is not bad roleplaying to be effective at the things your class is supposed to do, numbers are not a substitute for roleplaying and 2e is not a game where maxing out an attribute means actually being a one trick pony.

People sometimes are bringing in expectation that an 18/+4 means you're not "well rounded" because they're used to point buy where having an 18 actually does mean all your other attributes are bad, but in 2e all you get by sacrificing a +1 to your attack stat is a +1 to something else. +4 +3 +2 +1 0 -1 is already a typical 2e array that has a reasonable spread of high, medium, and low attributes, so all sacrificing that +4 is doing is letting you have +3 +3 +3 +1 0 -1. It's not that great a benefit for the tradeoff unless you're using a particularly MAD build, and it's even worse if that boost goes towards removing that -1 from an ancestry when you could've done that by simply using the variant boost rules.

+3 is not literally unplayable if you have no build justification for it, but Courageous Anthem remains extremely powerful because it gives you a +1 - you are absolutely making the game harder for yourself (and by extension all the other players at the table) in a way that isn't the easiest to account for as a GM. It is better to let go of expectations you have from other systems and to embrace that 2e expects you to "minmax" and that it doesn't preclude you from having a well rounded character.

Which all just further cements in my mind that I'd rather just not have attributes to begin with and avoid this stumbling block altogether. If the system expects particular arrays anyways and deviating from it almost always works against you, then it's basically not all that different from having trap feats - the illusion of adding flavor while mostly just mechanically stunting a character. I agree with the earlier post that Lancer does a better job by decoupling attack bonuses from attributes, even if many frames still want to dump particular stats and boost others there's still much more of a justification to have one array or another (ie the person saying to dump AGI on a barbie is just wrong, +1 speed on a frame with only 2 speed is a 50% speed increase and is often heavily felt), but for a fantasy game there's also the baggage of bioessentialism, the weirdness of trying to roleplay when your class demands you dump ephemeral personality and cogntiive traits, and so on. I'd rather lean more into skills and feats to take their place.

My guess is that "The GM decides based on the narrative" is meant to cover these sorts of edge cases in a way that makes sense. If a reactive strike kills an enemy, whether that enemy is able to do the thing they were trying to do before being killed is going to depend on the narrative. "The enemy pulls the lever by slumping on it" is the kind of stretch I think that the new rule is trying to imply that you *wouldn't* do as GM because the players are obviously trying to prevent the NPC from pulling the lever and killing the guy is typically effective at doing that, with crits simply being a way to do the same without it needing to be a killing blow. Without some sort of storygame "success, with complications" system it can come across as a diablo ex machina; if for whatever reason I *really* wanted that lever pulled I'd at least state up front before dice are rolled that the NPC dying won't be enough to stop them, and ideally I'd be saying this as early as possible, even at the start of combat if it's apparent that this scenario might happen because the goal of the fight is to prevent the NPC from sounding an alarm or letting in reinforcements or what have you.

For a very rules-driven game where the more common scenario is "if I kill this guy when he goes to attack an ally does that prevent them from damaging my ally" I think I'd have preferred a more concrete ruling, *generally* the GM isn't tasked with making a call in this kind of situation and instead trusts the system always has a rule, but personally I would go with the order of operations being that reactions that would incapacitate a character prevent that character from taking the action that triggered the reaction, and then make exceptions as appropriate from there with a bias towards letting the players do the things they're intending to do. If more than one player is involved, I would let the players decide what order their own actions are resolving in, because that is how it generally works in Lancer and it seems to work really well. Leaves nothing to really argue about and it adds some tactical depth and encourages teamplay and the payoff feels like a cool earned moment.

As for quantum lever pulling, I think it's better to understand an action like pulling a lever being more like "the two PC's see the NPC go for the lever and take a swing, knowing the NPC has left themselves vulnerable"; if they kill them, then the NPC being "in the middle" of their action simply means they never actually reached the lever. Same as any other "digital" action being interrupted by a crit or death, they went to go do the thing, another character saw their intentions and sprang into action, and they failed to do the thing.

Weirdness like bodies pulling levers or levers being stuck halfway, to me, feel like mitigating the foresight and positioning players put into intercepting the NPC and denying them their reward, and while I think the rule does allow for that to happen if the GM determines it could make sense in the narrative I think we ought to apply that nebulous concept of common sense and reserve those sorts of contrivances for when it's genuinely the most logical outcome or when it's clearly making the game more fun. If I'm going to have situations where unconscious bodies are pulling levers, it's probably going to be in the PC's favor.

I wouldn't be surprised an hyphothetic 3rd edition overhauled the amount of stats and how they work since most of the things in the Remater were made to go away from D&D, though at the same time I wouldn't be surprised they didn't because the six stats are an easy way to sell the game as a "D&D-like" (see how many people had an outrage with some Remaster changes because they removed X thing that came from D&D).

Also since it's most likely that if this were to happen Constitution would be merged into Strength, which ironically would kinda be a Dexterity buff since at least in PF2e Dex characters want to increase their Strength already (unless they are thieves) but they also obviously need Con so if you merge both together you'll be benefiting Dex characters a lot. I guess pure Str-based characters would still have both more damage and HP than Dex-based ones so that could compensate itself?

It's not like this system is going to be released tomorrow or anything, so this is literally pure speculation.

Hell, there's a variant rule that actually does this. It's not popular as it makes some very fundamental changes to the system that isn't supported in any VTT's that I know of and whose benefit is mostly "you can shift numbers around different" but I could imagine a 3e that does change out hte attributes.

However, I'm definitely in the camp of "remove attributes entirely." There's already a trend for TTRPG's to try to move away from the D&D bioessentialist roots, and having literal numbers describing exactly how smart or fit you are has some uncomfortable real word parallels.

I don't think it'd be morally bad to keep attributes, mind, it's simply a trend I've observed and I enjoy putzing with stats in many video games, but in Pathfinder attribute arrays tend to not be very interesting decisions to begin with. Especially with KAS, many classes really only want a particular array, give or take a boost in a tertiary attribute, with the "variety" simply being a different ironclad array needed to support a particular build. They're not really build-defining or interesting in themselves, they're simply the numbers you need to shift around to make the actually interesting decisions you made - weapons, archetypes, feats, spells - work.

Having a convoluted rework where we're separating out DEX into two stand and combining STR and CON and all this other stuff seems less interesting than simply having players explicitly state their intentions with a build and then by default making them *good* at the things they've chosen to do. Throw more feats in, those are fun. Fighters that can switch between rapiers and mauls and bows or specialize in one of those depending on feat choice, and then if htey take an archetype to cast spells then the only forethought required there is that they took the archetype and the archetype itself is responsible for making sure it's balanced rather than MAD restrictions. If a bard invests feats into doing melee then they can do melee.

It's likely more complicated than I'm making it out to be, since most TTRPG's use attributes of some kind, but I'd love for a third edition that just assumes you've got a +4 or whatever to your class's schtick, a +3 or +2 to an archetype's schtick, a set amount of HP that only gets modified if you go out of your way to do that, and so on. It seems like it would remove a lot of complexity in the system that isn't providing a porportionate amount of depth, which would make room to add complex stuff (like more feats) that *do* add more depth.

If I went with "what sounds better to run the game with" rather than a strict RAW interpretation, I would say that runes ought to be recoverable from destroyed items, for the purposes of not making destruction be essentailly worse than character death. You can roll a new character if your old one died and not be horribly behind in WBL, but if a player invested a ton into an item that then is destroyed then they're so far behind in WBL that they might as well kill off the character and roll a new one. The counterpoint to this would be "well then just make sure they get more treasure to compensate" but then why not just have the runes be salvageable in the first place to avoid the plot contrivances? Old sword got melted, go buy a new one and put the magic into it.

Runes are magic, they can function however we need them to function to make the game fun. They got introduced for the same reason, to make it so players could theoerically use whatever weapon or armor or shield or whatever they wish like a family heirloom and have it grow with them.

For the purposes of destroying evil Macguffins, requiring rituals to actually destroy them (and the magic in their runes) is in keeping with popular fiction and requires enough intent that either the players are doing it to an NPC or hte GM is really out to ruin a PC's day.

Buying a new base item still isn't cheap and you're still unable to use the item until you reach a settlement where you can buy a new one. It also normalizes the cost when running with Automatic Bonus Progression, there's not as wide a gap between ABP and vanilla games for when an item gets destroyed.

Also: the difference between grabbing a random picture off of deviantArt to serve as a character portrait and having an AI spit one out is that you can still source the former. There's no credit given to the giant bucket of artists whose work is being ripped off by the algorithm - to say nothing of how many chatbot evangelists claim the end result is an original work of art they themselves made.

it's about as sourceable as a de la soul song, which also is grabbing the IP of many artists. lots of songs have very short samples that haven't been identified, lost to time. and that doesn't really change that at many tables, people don't source their portraits because nobody at the table cares. what good is the "theoritcal" ability to source artwork if it's not exercised and nobody bothers to go look it up?

this isn't an objection based on material harm done to artists, it's still just moralizing art, and it still has the same problems of applying NFT logic to home games and ignoring the actual core of the issue which is labor relations to capital. cory doctorow has gone on about this topic in a way that's pretty convincing, adopting this myopic IP-centric argument against AI absolutely will be used against artists as companies simply use their vast, vast troves of IP to train "ethical" AI anyways that, in practice, is basically indistinguishable from the "unethically sourced" AI but still does the same material harm of reducing the wages of artists. a linked list of artists the AI probably drew from doesn't make that any better.

If you can point me to one that uses an ethically-sourced data set instead of stealing from uncredited artists en masse, I'll be nice about AI stuff.

Until then? I'm not interested in what a blind algorithm spits out by ripping off people. It doesn't help that the folks who like it are some of the loudest evangelicals on the internet today.

sure, but again nabbing character art off of google images has been the norm for decades. iunno why just now suddenly we should all start pretending the neoliberal conception of intellectual property matters for home games, as though the only "ethical" ways to have character art for a game of adult make beleive are to either draw stick figures, go to art school, or comission artwork for hundreds of dollars. being so bold as to run an unauthorized IP as a setting for a game liek Star Wars or Pokémon is right out too because oh no we don't own that intellectual property either.

the issue with AI art comes down to that of labor, of companies using AI generation as a way to discipline labor and drive down the wages of artists. framing it in terms of IP only benefits those same companies, 'cause guess who owns those IP's? even imgur could easily add a "you must affirm you have permission to upload content to our website and consent to its use in AI" or whatever and turn this whole IP-based argument against AI against those same aritsts, just as the moral panic over sampling only benefited record labels instead of protecting any artists.

if we were talking about anything commercial, where artists are actually being screwed over in the name of increasing some company's margins on a product, sure, there's an actual public interest. but when we're morally condeming the use of AI art in literally home games then it ends up boiling down to either moralizing art or reifying the same horrible copyright laws that we would normally recognize as the abusive tools of the wealthy to pretend that it's possible to own ideas for the sake of extracting money out of everyone. like at the least we should be able to say that there exists certain s0paces, like home games, that at least morally exist outside The Market™ and that it's OK to ignore IP law and that it would be bad to introduce such invasive IP standards that it's not OK To pretend your character is Darth Vader or use some s%%+ty facsimile of his likeness. we have all been "stealing art" to use as forum avatars and character portraits and character concepts for decades, don't give up this private space to property law too.

tl;dr don't take up NFT logic trying to argue that it's morally bad to use AI art in private for completley noncommerical purposes

I do like the idea of moving away from the tag altogether and focusing more on the actual heuristic Paizo's been using to judge whether something ought to be a monk weapon. Avoids the need to throw "monk" on anything Asian and lets people use weird weapons that represent unorthodox martial art traditions from around the world.

I do think a thing to consider is the ergonomics of actually building a character with such a change. If a more complicated heuristic is needed, tags help people quickly visually filter what is and isn't relevant without leaving too much room for error. But the problem is having a tag literally applies a label. Maybe if the tag is literally applied to *all* weapons that meet whatever heuristic, that would avoid the tag having that orientalist bent... at least so long Asian weapons aren't pigeonholed into being foreign, exotic advanced weapons with lots of traits while European weapons are more straightforward damage dealers (and more often represented on optimized builds as a result) because they're "normal."

In general I dislike people shutting down discussions with baseless assertions that their feedback does not matter. I'd rather have a thread of people trying to interpret the game and its balance and that maybe not bearing fruit than have a thread spend its first posts arguing about whether to even have the thread in the first place. I know the Roll20 forums used to explicitly disallow this, though they had an upvote system to more organically decide which threads deserved attention without any need for naysaying to weed actually bad ideas out.

It's hard to know what scope of changes are even on the table for the alchemist. It's always been in a rough spot as the first class that did magic without spell slots in this system, and despite its reworks it's still often seen as not quite there. Some of the feats, at hte least, certainly need to be reworked; as mentioned earlier, spending level 18 feat for something that situational that also has a ton of conditions on top of it is just wey out of line with what other classes are able to do with their own level 18 slots. A level 8 feat from another class would probably beat that out, almost regardless of build, that's not a good place for such a top shelf class feat to be.

I did miss the description of the Holy and Unholy traits in the Remastered Core Preview. Thank you.

I'll certainly be disappointed if the possibility of having morally bad Holy and morally good Unholy characters is written off. Those are reasonably popular tropes in media, bad guys with holy aesthetics or even "good" gods themselves being villains as well as brooding anti-heroes who question the moralizing nature of calling this or that "evil" based on some line drawn or association with a particular thing that has no actual moral weight. At the very least, having options like tieflings or sorcerors that have some sort of Unholy power that makes them a little weak to Holy attacks without that requiring them actually be villainous is the sort of interesting option I'd want on the table, ways to dip into stereotypically evil things without running into the problem of being Henry Kissinger in a party full of Anthony Bourdains.

I argue that for the majority of players they either:

A. Have system knowledge enough to not be hindered.
B. Are so new they are probably better off choosing an ancestry and then background before class, because both help form the idea of a character for a new player.

I mean, I'd say a class also helps form the idea of a character for a new player. It just also has the advantage of working out more smoothly and more naturally resulting in a reasonably functioning character if someone is learning the system step by step, since knowing what a Key Ability is and what yours is more naturally guides even brand new players to getting that 18 in their attack, rather than the kinda common sight of a new player picking attributes that are irrelevant to their class because at the time they didn't know what that class would be.

The class entries in general have useful build advice for novices to know which attributes to prioritize, so then when they go to pick their ancestry they might know to opt for the variant boosts without having to backtrack and redo any steps, and might have a better picture of what ancestry feat will complement their class. And then leaving the background for last lets that step do its job of being flexible, filling in the gaps from the prior two steps rather than a player investing in a lot of INT before they notice their class's advice says that INT isn't very useful for their class.

I'd say that starting with ancestry + background is actually better left as more of an advanced thing, something a player might want to do if they've got a picture in their head already or are already familiar enough with the system to go looking for a class that might work well with it, or are otherwise experienced enough that they can handle their attributes not being quite as optimized as they should be without struggling too much during 2e's more difficult early levels.

Magus not having INT definitely fails the vibe check. When I think of a magus in the Pathfinder/D&D sense, I'm thinking of a warrior scholar, a sword in one hand and potentially a spellbook in the other. Mechanically, I'm sure there's different ways to either justify having INT be important/at least reasonably optional, but if the Magus class is not actually benefiting from having the highest or one of the highest +INT bonuses to the booksmart skills then it undermines the fantasy of the class. I'd be fine with maybe having different mental attributes for different spellcasting traditions in a rework, like a divine magus to have RAW way to capture that classic 1e divine nuker paladin archetype, but having *something* to make them feel more like they're a legitmate caster that just so happens to also see value in stabbing people and has blended the two practices together I think is important.

I mean, if I'm GMing and someone told me "hey, Arcane Cascade doesn't work" my response would be "sure it does" and I hope we could leave it at that. Please don't argue with me that your stuff doesn't work.

Even if your response was correct - which I really don't think it is, though I'm sure how you assume it works is perfectly fair and functional - not taking the time to explain to a player that is struggling to understand how something works is going to create problems, both in terms of play when they inevitably end up using their abilities incorrectly (if they didn't know after reading it and possibly looking online for an answer, how would they learn the correct interpretation if you were unwilling to share it?) and socially. Responding to genuine concerns, even those you might think are silly, is either going to clarify it for your player or make you aware of something, since just being the GM doesn't mean you know the rules perfectly either or aren't capable of learning something new.

Which makes Arcane Cascade's ambiguity annoying, because it certainly is frustrating for a GM that has assumed the rules function on a basic level to then need to make a call on the mechanical balance of a class with likely zero context. It would be nice if Paizo would pick one of the common interpretations and just said "until the Magus rework comes out, just go with this for now."

I know it's not quite as cute as having an ABC character system (Ancestry, Background, Class), but virtually anyone with any experience in nearly any RPG will advise their players to pick a class first instead of an ancestry. Sure, ABC makes sense in terms of chronological order of events - you're born, you go through life, and then you become a level 1 adventurer - but in terms of making life much easier for new players, most should be picking a class that looks fun/cool and then]/i] picking an ancestry and background.

I know it won't ever really be changed in PF2e, but maybe by PF3e we could make that small change to set players up for success, especially those that really need a step-by-step list to learn. Obviously anyone can do any of the steps out of order, but that requires a certain level of confidence that a player not used to very crunchy RPG's might not yet have, and since they are unlikely to have any set preferences about the "right" way to make a character that's a prime opportunity to nudge them closer to what seems to work for [i]most people.

I just want more class archetypes, in general. A lot of what attracts someone to the idea of a class is a vibe or mechanic, but then something else about the default assumptions of the class contradicts that. Pf1 had a ton of class archetypes that allowed you to play pretty radically different versions of a class, to the point where they were basically a new class made that just hapoened to share some ideas from the base class. If people insist on having "Wizard" on the tin because they want an INT based nerd that reads so much they learn to do magic, why not make class archetypes to that end that make the class better suited to a simpler playstyle but keeping the basic identity and feat pool? If people don't like the Psychic for having the wrong vibes, I think you can port the mechanical gist of it to a CA to plamt on an arcane class.

The only errata Power Attack might need is a name change, both to avoid potential OGL nonsense (it's such a generic name that I doubt it'd be an issue anyways, but maybe Paizo already changed it out of an abundance of caution) and to better communicate what its purpose is so people don't feel disappointed that it isn't good at things it was never meant to be good at. It's meant to work around resistances or otherwise exploit temporary buffs or opportunities that only impact a single Strike, it's not meant to be (nor does 2e's design goals permit) a general bread-and-butter attack that you try to do as much as possible. The only exception to this general design principle is the Flurry Ranger.

The only "buff" I'd offer to 2h builds is more feat options at level 1 that are maybe generically good to better exploit that they don't really need any feats to work well. Maybe feats that explicitly only work well with 2h non-reach weapons and not 2h reach weapons, since the drop from d12 to d10 damage IMO isn't by itself enough to compensate for the many advantages reach grants you. Reach fighters are really the most visible "OP" end of the current Pathfinder meta whose only real drawback is the very slight damage nerf relative to non-reach weapons and the lack of a martial d10 hammer or flail reach weapon, since stunlocking with that crit effect is so powerful. But since the latter is confirmed as being nerfed into something far more reasonable, I could see an argument that a Fighter feat to make taking a greatsword or greataxe be a bit better would make some sense. Maybe in the form of feats that temporarily grant you Reach that won't stack with existing Reach weapons.

Unicore wrote:

I will only make this one post in this thread and then leave it for folks who want to homebrew new options for their own tables, but this very much is a homebrew thread.

The remastered wizard is long done at this point. Asking for things like new and more interesting schools, focus spells and class feats is still something that could result in new printed options, and there is a possibility of archetypes like Elementalist, Rune Lord, cathartic mage, and Dragon Disciple being offered as ways to hone in specifically on thematic ideas, but that isn't about remastering the wizard, a process which, for better or worse, was done entirely in house with minimal direct and specific feedback from players.

So I don't really know how to treat this like "something more positive," for players frustrated at the decisions made about the wizard remastery, because nothing anyone posts here possibly could change the wizard remastery, even if it was the best, most universally loved idea possible. The best case scenario for class-based changes to the structure of the wizard here would be a homebrew class that became exceedingly popular amongst players, but it would still need to be homebrew first at this point.

Squaring up like a linebacker towards all dissenting opinion is tiring to watch, Unicore, and that's coming from soneone who agrees with 70 percent of the stuff you say.

In their defense, it is useful context to know Paizo's not going to implement any of this in time for the Remaster so people aren't getting their hopes up, though yeah in general I dislike people trying to shut down/derail discussions others are finding useful.

With alignment being removed and "good" and "evil" no longer necessarily lining up one-to-one with being holy or unholy, I think a post-Asmodeus conflict in hell could be a lot more interesting and have more nuanced personalities that players could care about. The holy gods could also be less than perfect or have a genuine prick amongst their ranks that's aligned out of cosmic convenience rather than any sense of genuine benevolence towards mortals. Holy gods politcking to make sure their favored ruler of Hell gains power sounds like ripe fodder for drama, or at least Sarenrae cooperating with some sympathetic devils to sneak some souls out of Hell. Or maybe a holy god becomes unholy to fill that power vacuum in what they think at the time is the most expedient way to avoid a bloodbath, suffering the rejection of their old allies and the distrust of the other unholy gods.

Also gotta agree, it'd be disappointing to see Lamashtu go right when alignment's gone. Without being labelled as either good or evil per se, there's a lot more room for nuance with her that I would appreciate.

maffs

Another factor in that as the gap between a character's attack modifier and non-attack modifiers and MAP increases, the more value a character will likely see in spending all three actions on attacking. This would likely reduce the tactical complexity of the game, with fighters and gunslingers in particular getting absolutely absurd crit ranges that make not attacking even more punishing.

With more spread out boosts capped at +5 at 10 and +6 at 20, characters would have stronger defensive stats, namely HP, that would probably still be problematic, just not in the sense that monsters are getting critted into oblivion but rather that they'll struggle much more targeting the no-longer-weak saves of players and needing to deal a chunk more damage to boot to deal with the increased player HP. Not as dramatic an issue, but like maybe monsters would need to be a level higher than normal, at least once you get past level 10 and the extra attribute boosts come into effect.

I like the double-boosting idea, but it was pointed out to me that taking the double-boost at 10 means you can only boost 3 attributes. If you are reasonably MAD that you care about 4 attributes, or have two dump stats, then this system would force you to boost the 5th stat you don't care about.

Consider a heavy-armor champion that decides they have no need for DEX or INT. Starting with a 4-2-2-1-0-0 array, they can boost STR/CON/CHA/WIS, then STR/CON/CHA/WIS again at 10 for a 5-4-4-3-0-0 array at level 10.

With double-boosting, they're forced to take a dump stat as they can't invest in STR. So their boosts look like CON/CHA/WIS/INT and STR/STR/CON/CHA for a 5-4-4-2-1-0 array at 10th.

While they get the extra 5th stat from levels 5-9, it's not something this example cares much for, so they end up with a weaker array at 10-14, losing out on their 4th priority stat.

You normally may not increase an attribute above +4.

Beginning at level 5, you may spend two boosts to boost any one attribute twice, up to a maximum of +4. You may only do this once per level up.

Beginning at level 10, you may spend two boosts to boost your key attribute from +4 to +5.

Beginning at level 15, you may spend two boosts to boost up to a maximum of three attributes from +4 to +5.

Beginning at level 20, you may spend two boosts to boost your key attribute from +4 to +5.

---

So to show my work:

Level 1
Base starting array: 4 2 2 1 0 0

Level 5
My system: 4 4 3 2 0 0 (legal RAW array, just start with 3 3 2 1 0 0)
RAW: 4* 3 3 2 0 0

Level 10
My system: 5 4 4 3 0 0
RAW: 5 4 4 3 0 0

Level 15
My system: 5 5 5 3 0 0
My system, alternate: 5 5 4 4 1 0
RAW: 5* 4* 4* 4 0 0

Level 20
My system: 6 5 5 4 1 0
RAW: 6 5 5 4 1 0

---

Now it should be one-to-one With RAW. The restriction on doing it once per level up is necessary to avoid it being possible to have a 4 4 4 1 0 0 array at level 5 with a two free boost ancestry, which RAW isn't possible (and that's one of the things I like about RAW, forcing you to have a reasonable spread of values for attributes). My older restriction that it only be available if you can't otherwise boost four different attributes was more complicated and ultimately unnecessary.

Aside from the Holy/Unholy thing, the lowercase e evil part of it is that necromancy in Golarian does not nice things to souls and the fabric of reality that make it a very jerkass thing to do, regardless of your damage resistances, and so it immediately puts one in conflict with most other people. It's the classic problem of most players wanting to play Anthony Bourdain and one player wanting to play Henry Kissinger - the other players can't be Anthony Bourdain anymore because they're not actually Anthony Bourdain if they do not beat Henry Kissinger to death with their bare hands. If you're playing Henry Kissinger, everyone else has to make characters that would tolerate the presence of Henry Kissinger.

Which, as Captain Morgan said, is a big showstopper for something as complicated as an entire class. Their approach of making a troop summoner class that has necromancy as an option sounds like the most viable way to go about it, it's easier to have niche options that can't work in every party or campaign if they're not by themselves taking up pages and pages of rules that took months of design and playtesting to create.

One possible consequences of making the PF2 and SF2 rules very compatible, is that it will make a much more tempting for a computer game company to develop a solid core system that could be used to make games for either, running entirely alongside the ORC License with no OGL content to worry about.

This is indeed exciting, but I wonder if by the time such an engine would be made that people's interest would have already shifted to a PF/SF3e by then. Like a common take is that we're maybe halfway through PF2e's lifecycle and games take a while to make, especially games being made after a TTRPG that isn't even going to be out until 2025 or later is released. I know my interest in the Owlcat games was diminshed significantly because I just prefer the 2e rules so very much over 1e. Though maybe 2e being so much more robust than 1e means a longer lifecycle, and thus more time for video games to come out while 2e's still all the rage?

I don't understand getting disappointed about something not changing from how it has always worked.

Like if going from 18 to 19 to 20 in two boosts was a huge failure of design, I'm confused why we never saw people complaining about it before the remaster? Like suggesting house rules or something?

I'm not sure that it actually is difficult to understand, but it does require undoing a couple assumptions about why people are disappointed and then wondering why people have such imagined silly motivations for disliking it.

People here aren't *suddenly* disappointed that partial boosts are going to be a thing, for the most part we were always disappointed that's how the system worked and were really hopeful that this would have been touched up as part of the remaster alongside many of the more dramatic changes - changes that certainly are more of an issue for converting characters than any alternative boosting system would be, especially those that simply give you an effective extra boost to work with to one of your two lowest stats.

The discourse over the "it's just a box you check" thing is also similarly misunderstanding the issue. It is inelegant as I posted before, but a bit of inelegance in the name of balance is something I imagine most 2e players are OK with. It's an assumption that this is about character sheet space concerns, responding as though that's silly since it's just a checkbox, and then acting surprised when people are still saying they dislike the partial boosts even though I don't think anyone's actually making this out to be a layout preference.

What my and other comments keep pointing out is the dead levels problem, being asked to pay for a thing but not get the thing until much, much later (potentially months!) for a payoff that might not actually come to fruition, which is exacerbated by the system RAW not permitting you to retrain attributes (which itself is very weird, as it makes more sense to neglect weightlifting to study books than to forget specific information on how to do a technique in a feat). That doesn't actually do anything to balance having a higher to-hit stat with having a more MAD array, like the benefits a MAD array needs to justify itself over boosting your key attribute don't include temporarily having a higher 4th stat, and it's clearly not the only way to accomplish having the dimishing returns or even the specific pacing of increases we see in 2e. It's just... seems more like it was made to work this way to maybe justify having 12's and 16's and 18's instead of modifiers, or some other arcane reason that I don't think anyone at Paizo's really explained other than "we didn't think of anything else."

And I've been arguing for Champions without patron deities since the playtest. Should I be disappointed when this doesn't happen in Player Core II?

...yeah. It's completely fine to be disappointed that something that would be a good option, that probably should have been an option from the start, isn't coming. I think that's a really important in general for player characters to have the option to opt out of religious stuff due to many players having IRL traumas from that, and I think it's worth bringing that up so Paizo's aware that's still a thing people want - even if that's easier to houserule, having it in the print means it has to be negotiated every time a player wants to opt out of that, which isn't something a player would always feel comfortable doing. Why frame this in terms of whether people should or shouldn't feel something, rather than the actual merits of the rules?

This is why the GM sets up expectations about the level range of the campaign beforehand.

If campaigns went as expected, there wouldn't be an entire little cottage industry for GM advice and conflict resolution. People don't even finish single player video games a lot of the time and the only point of failure is yourself, barring genuine gamebreaking technical issues.

This amounts to little more than telling GM"s to "git gud" over an extremely common experience I'm sure you've dealt with yourself. Pretending that campaigns don't often end before planned isn't a very convincing argument that people shouldn't be frustrated that they feel they have to *plan* around their group falling apart to get their reward, it's just moralizing it as though only bad players and bad GM's would have any complaints. Campaigns can take years, and in those years things beyond anyone's control can happen, or it might be healthier for a game to end than to see it through to the planned ending. You already know that.

I mean, not knowing your casting modifier is about on par with not knowing your strength modifier when you go to swing a weapon. It's simpler, sure, but not simpler in a way that I think actually matters for accessibility.

I think the reason may be that casters in general are going to be expected to cast a lot more focus spells and that those will be more of the bread and butter of casters, with cantrips being more of a backup option. But it's hard to guess exactly what the intention is there until someone from Paizo explains it to us.

This also I guess makes cantrips very slightly better for characters that are getting their spellcasting as a dedication, like a fighter that sometimes casts a cantrip to deal ranged damage - but that's still a bad idea overall as you need your casting modifier to be high to land the damn attack in the first place and throwing weapons and crossbows do that job better in such a scenario.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I wonder what the reason for not letting people go from 18 straight to 20 (and so on) was to begin with. Like I know that if we did that now some of the math would break, but if they had done that from the beginning they probably could have accounted for scores as high as 28.

I think part of the idea is it creates a soft catch up point. It takes the same number of boosts to go from 10 to 18 as 18 to 22. So it limits how much vertical scaling there is.

I feel like hard attribute caps at certain levels would have been better though, since it would provide the same result while also making it easier to diversify, which is something PF2 kind of struggles with.

This is my logic as well. The system generally wants to make reasonably well-rounded characters that can do things outside of their combat niche (ie, strength-based characters can Intimidate worth a s!+% because their 16/18 in CHA isn't unfathomably far behind the 20/22 in CHA a Sorceror might have, but if 28 was the cap then the difference between the two would be much more significant), so I *get* the diminishing returns, I just really dislike the mechanism by which they've been doing it.

I feel like it is an annoyance more people are aware of, but it's the kind of thing that you can sometimes get mocked for bringing up with how defensive the PF2e community is known to be at times. It feels bad, worse than "you're missing one out of your four boosts" may initially imply because it's more like you're missing a boost to your third least favorite stat, but it still feels too much like the marshmallow experiment where scientists gave children a marshmallow and promised to give them another one if they didn't eat it for ten minutes or whatever. You're stuck gauging on a meta level how likely it is for the campaign to actually reach a high enough level for your investment to matter, before either the campaign ends early due to in-game events or because of the inevitable churn of scheduling conflicts.

This also seems like it is completely a 'feels bad' type of problem rather than an actual 'is bad' problem.

What exactly does an ability score of 19 mean anyway other than a partial boost between 18 and 20? Writing it down differently on the sheet doesn't actually change anything. I'm not sure why it changes how it 'feels' either.

It's not that it feels bad because it changed, it's that what we had already was bad (or at least feels bad) and it's frustrating to see that not meaningfully changed but also packaged in a less elegant way. The 18 to 19 to 20 thing I don't think should have been how it ever worked and I was hoping the Paizo team would have agreed when they went to do the remaster.

Attribute Boosts

An attribute boost normally increases an attribute modifier’s value by 1. However, if the attribute modifier to which you’re applying an attribute boost is already +4
or higher, instead mark “partial boost” on the character sheet for that attribute. If the attribute already has a partial boost invested in it, increase the modifier by 1
and uncheck the box. At 1st level, a character can never have any attribute modifier that’s higher than +4.

When your character receives an attribute boost, the rules indicate whether it must be applied to a specific attribute modifier, to one of a limited list, or whether
it’s a “free” attribute boost that can be applied to any attribute modifier of your choice. Dwarves, for example, receive an attribute boost to their Constitution modifier and their Wisdom modifier, as well as one free attribute boost, which can be applied to any other attribute.

When you gain multiple attribute boosts at the same time, you must apply each one to a different modifier. This means you can’t apply a partial boost to an attribute modifier and apply another boost simultaneously to increase it.

I was really hoping Paizo would take the opportunity of the new Core books to address the annoying problem of there being a five level stretch where players are expected to be down a boost in order to have a higher attack modifier later, a kind of exchange that the system overall tries to discourage. The "partial boosts" are also a bit less elegant than the original boost of 18 to 19 to 20 even if mechanically they're identical.

I would have much rather the math be changed up a tiny bit to avoid the need for having that awkward five level period. In practice all we really want is for players to need to spend 2 boosts instead of 1 past a +4 modifier, and to also limit how many attributes can be boosted in that way to force relatively well-rounded characters no matter what, the five level period feels more like a vestigal side effect of a clumsy attempt to accomplish that rather than something that Paizo intentionally believes is a necessary drawback to balance the power of a higher to-hit.

What I've been doing has just been allowing my players to just respec on level up regardless, including attribute scores, so it's not like there isn't a way to work around this, under the logic that if a player having four functional boosts isn't a problem from levels 5 through 9 and a player having a higher to hit isn't a problem at levels 10 through 14, then it shouldn't be a problem if a player goes through both scenarios. It's just mildly unsatisfying for the RAW method to still be so penalizing.

Another relatively minor change - right now you have to increase a score from 18 to 19 and then 19 to 20, which is five levels where you effectively only have 3 instead of 4 boosts for no benefit. Which runs counter to 2e overall being very insistent on not giving you the option to suck or have less nice things now in exchange for power later, and RAW I don't believe you can retrain attribute scores.

It would be nice to have somw way to smooth that over, to delay the ability to get a +5 or +6 and have it cost more without having that awkward period. I currently work around this by simply letting people respec on level up for free, but it seems too inelegant to be RAW.

Probably that gnomish Flickmace thing could go the way of the do-do, if I've followed discussions here correctly.

I was thinking smaller things than impactful balance changes, but I don't think that'd be necessary with the upcoming changes.

What made flickmace good was being a d8 one handed reach weapon whose crit spec knocked the target prone with no save, with bludgenoning damage type being really good too. The original nerf took it from d8 to d6 (so not maxing out one handed damage while also having an incredibly powerful weapon trait) while giving it sweep (apparently to make it feel more flail-y), but this didn't change that its crit specialization knocked people prone. Being able to knock enemies prone at reach is very powerful, and on a Fighter they're very likely to crit. But because the flickmace is one-handed and very easy to get due to its racial trait (racial advanced weapons are much easier to get than regular advanced weapons), you could either do this *and* have a shield, or more annoying you could hold another g*+!!#n flickmace in the other hand and just absolutely ruin an NPC's day.

Now that hammers and flails are going to at least require a save, I think that capacity to stunlock enemies will be reasonably addressed. Pretty much all the hammers and flails were annoyingly effective auto-picks for Fighters outside of specific builds that need a particular trait or weapon and this dials them back reasonably. The flickmace simply stood out for being the most obnoxious of these weapons due to its reach and damage output while also having a hand free to do yet more b@*@*$$+, but without the stunlock it's merely going to be good but not necessarily worth spending a feat or heritage on.

Tiny little things that maybe don't have a big overall impact but fix some annoyance you have. For me, I want leaning from cover to be codified as an actual action. As it currently exists, you *can* lean around cover for one action to attack (or for free if you're shooting through a slit or similar), but it's buried in the cover rules where it's hard to find and reference. Myself and players alike just assume that it would be an action if it existed and start thinking we misremembered it or something, only to find where it is in the rules after the session. I wanna be able to add that action to a character sheet in Foundry and just click it so everyone can see the rules and see the action being spent.

Bomber Alchemists need legendary prof. with alchemical bombs for the same reason gunslingers need legendary prof. in firearms.

Right now the most effective use of an alchemist's core class ability is to craft the bomb, and then to gain maximum hit chance, hand it to the fighter to throw.

Imagine the gunslinger only got master firearms proficiency. The core ability of the class to craft and use firearms would be best served by handing the gun to a fighter to shoot it.

An alchemist's ENTIRE IDENTITY is to make alchemical items. If they are not the best at using alchemical items (or at least tied for best), then the core class identity is broken (in a bad way).

You could get away with specific alchemical items being designed for certain classes that the alchemist itself doesn't have much use for, the same way haste is better to cast on the martial than yourself, but bombs are a core alchemical item type that the class has an entire subclass dedicated to, and which no other class has a specific focus on.

Even if we don't want Legendary proficiency per se, I think this is a core problem - it should not be more efficient to hand everything over to party members. Handing some things over is neat and cool, but the alchemist *has* to be the absolute best at chucking their own bombs, no questions asked. Whether that come in the form of action economy, proficiency, damage output, gold cost, new penalties, however it's achieved it's important that the Alchemist is the best at throwing their own bombs. That is a niche that needs protecting, even if another class comies around that's focused on throwing bombs that class should have some barrier that keeps their existence in a party from making the Alchemist feel implicitly pressured to give them their bombs.

It doesn't even matter if the Alchemist doesn't actually hand out their bombs or if it's not actually more effective to hand out their bombs, that the thought is crossing people's minds has an impact on the fun of the class. If someone suspects the fun thing they're doing is "greedy" and less effective, that feels bad for a lot of people. Making Alchemist players feel secure knowing that they're unquestioanbly the best at using the alchemical items they create lets them feel powerful, like any class should make players feel.

scrolling through this i just see a severe desire for massive power creep

I don't think that's a helpful response, it just amounts to accusing people of some moral fault for having a take on the game's mechanics you dislike. I think it would be better to talk about what you view as excessive power creep rather than insinuating people have some ulterior motive, as though nobody here is a GM that would obviously be running monsters against these PC options.

In other words, we will never again have debates about what Chaotic / Lawful means or should be.

I mean, getting one's politics from the cosmology of really old pulp fantasy can lead to some Jordan Peterson tier takes (CHAOS DRAGONS), with utterly incoherent ideas that aren't built from an understanding of material reality or history but instead from trying to squeeze reality into a taxonomy that was never *made* to reflect any aspect of reality.

I get enjoying it as an evocative prompt and I'm sure people can still make interesting characters by essentially pretending their character is actually one of the nine alignments, but the debates were mostly just people tying their brains up in knots and doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to do extremely bad philosophy. It was like a degree removed from horoscopes.

While that's a viewpoint...

It's also important to ask if anyone on that podcast was mixed? Or if they were just giving an outsider perspective that is no more valid than anyone else's.

Growing up with a Chinese name and being a quarter Chinese - It's been made brutally clear to me that I have no business speaking for or even alongside the Asian community. The only people who have ever asked me to speak with them as if I was one of them were the Chicanos where I grew up - and I'm not even Mexican American.

The topic of diversity of single-heritage people may seem similar to that of mixed heritage, but it's not identical. And some PoC need to back off from claiming they can speak for mixed folk like me just as much as White folk already know to do. They can speak 'about' me the same way someone might speak about a person of another heritage. But they cannot claim to speak for me or any other multi-ethnic person.

They are however, correct that in the USA 'White' is treated as a default. And in tRPGs, as an originally American product; Human has long proxied for that. Especially given how before D&D 4E came out there were very-few non-White humans in the 'd20' sphere of gaming. I remember being excited back during 3.0 when I discovered they had non-White elves in Faerun that were NOT Drow. Something I had not seen in older...

Everyone on that podcast was mixed race. It was a lot of people too, many who pushed back on the "half" thing because that obviously doesn't describe people's actual ancestry which can be much more than two things in equal parts. They brought up your point about being excluded from particular communities and seemed to conclude that's kinda b$~!&~~~ and obviously they're not viewed as white just because they're black and Chinese.

Podcast more generally makes sure to bring on people with relevant experiences, so I find it pretty useful to hear things outside my own bubble.

Asians Represent!: Episode 43: Mixed Race Representation in D&D

Episode webpage: http://oneshotpodcast.com

Media file: https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/7d9dff34-0e4a-4136-a13f-68a2f5c2d3dd/episo des/ded9a561-4e73-4e7c-ac3d-4be46c9fe17b/audio/9dc4b63f-7f02-49c8-8584-1144 245de304/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=qj7mNz7k

keftiu wrote:

From today's PaizoCon streams, we got some very interesting news: both of these are presented in Player Core under a 'Mixed Ancestries' section... and are no longer restricted to being Half-Human!

I'm surprised 1/2 human wasn't the heritage you add to abcestries.

The Asians Represent podcast did an episode on this, and they had a lot to say about the racialozation of orcs and elves and how humans get used as a proxy for whiteness - so same reason people usually aren't called half-white, as that's the assumed default. They were also pretty critical of orcs only being available if they were half human.

This chamges just make sense. Of course different ancestries are going to interact without that being mediated by humans. They don't pause in stasis until a human shows up lol.

For example, boosting the success effect of every single 5th level spell to anywhere near synesthesia’s level would be a pretty massive balance shift in the game.

Yeah, it's just not feasible to always buff literally everything else to be as good as the best option. Some choice nerfs are perfectly acceptable, just as the nerf to gnome flickmace was ultimately far more practical than the many, many buffs that would've been necessary to accomplish relative parity otherwise. "Buff everything else" is sometimes decent advice if the rest of the game isn't fun and everything else needs changing anyways for being boring, but if that isn't the problem then nerfing a strong option is going to be less disruptive overall.

Which, for Bard, yeah I can see an argument to why Inspire Courage can feel like an action tax that you're compelled to pay by the raw overwhelming math of it. There's not really any strategic element to it, it's very straightforward and easy to use, and so it can end up feeling like that character only effectively has two actions because there's just not many good reasons to ever stop Inspiring Courage other than emergencies like fleeing combat or stabilizing an ally.

That simplicity might be desirable for some players, buffbot is often a favorite of people who don't or can't really engage with combat, but I struggle to think of a cantrip that could compare that rewards a more engaging playstyle.

Helmic wrote:

it's not worth supporting a bigot.

Can you please not call people bigots just because they have different views to you. That is unkind.

i like being unkind to bigots though. especially the mad lad shad, who is a raging homophobe, my favorite kind of bigot to cyberbully. feels good to say mean internet things about this guy to dissuade people from supporting a bigot, gonna make it a shad fad.

We are not talking about autism, since autism is not a mental illness. Sorry, that's a sticking point for me. I'm autistic.

As am I, and it is not a mental illness. However, I do think we share a lot of interests with the mad pride movement over the basic demands for autonomy and consent in care, which is why I felt a need to bring up those arguments from the mad pride movement. I don't want to throw comrades under the bus, so I feel obligated to mention that so that people who are critical of mental illness treatment are not presented as inherently bad or unhealthy for doing so. The only good horror set in a psych ward is the horror of what that treatment was and not the patients themselves, after all.

To bring us back to the thread's topic, though, since I mostly brought that up just to agree with someone else, I'd rather be safe than sorry with the things put in front of players as prompts. One of three or so lines being readable in a bad way as a player's introduction to what PC dwarves are about starts the ancestry off on the wrong foot.

Lamashtu's edicts and anathemas are a little iffy, is the thing. She's not anti-cure, she's explicitly anti-treatment--not just of disabilities, but mental illnesses. That one anathema, and not the alignment, is what really lies between her and getting sympathetic clerics. I do think she has a compelling side, but she's kind of a mess.

Also, to be clear, I'm coming at this as someone who also often feels a lot of pressure to get parts of my body "fixed" just to get by in our society. I don't want anyone to misread me here.

A lot of my own development of autistic liberation theory is drawing from mad pride, so I'm fairly sympathetic to the anti-"treatment" angle as well - it's not as though ABA even currently promises a flat out cure. But regardless, the issue had always been that this thing was lumped in with a god that's otherwise a gigantic a!~%!&#, to act as an antagonist to the PC's whose followers are easily visually recognizable for being the wrong shape.

But with alignment not being a hardcoded thing, I like the possibility of the same god having sects that could be described as good or evil based on what aspects they're clinging to and how they're rationalizing it. Before with allowed follower alignments, it was more of a range of acceptable behavior that the deity would tolerate, but now it could be more like three sides having utterly irreconcilable differences over the same god.

I do think we need a better counter to Lamashtu. Lamashtu, to me, is the goddess of "get worse"--give in to the mental health spirals, don't take your medication, immerse yourself in negative body image talk and stop making any effort, etc. Any truths in her preachings are just bait, sympathetic ideas to make the more sinister messaging go down easier. Nualia isn't a villain because she didn't want to be pretty, she's a villain because she embarked down a path of deliberate self-destruction.

It might work better, though, if there was a deity who preached body neutrality and body acceptance, who discouraged the pressure to "cure" disabilities, that sort of thing. Someone directly opposed to Lamashtu who captures those truths in a more healthy way.

Or is there already a deity like that? I'm not super up-to-date on all the deities, and I'm pretty tired at the moment.

Disability justice includes quite a bit of antimedicalism, against the medical model of disability. The anti-cure angle of it resonates with me being an autistic dude that didn't have the best of experiences with the attempts to "fix" it. Mad pride's also a thing that's got a more complicated relationship with professionals than many assume.

Basically, the desire to not be reshaped in the Abled's image so that the Abled doesn't have to fear becoming Disabled. It forces a different perspective to addressing the "problem" of our existence, much how we had to raise a stink to get people to shut up about Autism Awareness (promoted by an organization that viewed aweareness as a means to a cure) and instead talk about Autism Acceptance (we're not going away, so accept that).

I dislike "unhealthy" here as I get accused of that when I talk about antimedicalism in the context of autism, this assumption that others know better than me by default because I'm not normal and they are, despite most autistic people knowing quite a bit more about ABA and its history than the general public. It rankles people as an attack on someone's autonomy by questioning their capacity to make decisions in their own best interest. I know that's not what you were getting at, but it's a very loaded term that you might be more familiar with in the context of body shaming people for being fat.

But this is actually one of the things I'm excited about with the removal of alignment, since it does open up the possibility of Lamashtu worshippers who are coming at it from that angle that aren't absolute a&%!~$$s. Get some gnolls who are really insistent about having ramps and s$@@ instead of making the guy who just broke his leg use magic to climb the stairs. Or having other gods have stranger cults and sects that do very fundamentally different things with wildly diverging ideas of what their god wants.

Large leshies, centaurs, minotaurs...

I am unsure the PF2 system can fully dispense Large at Level One as, say, a heritage, without some extreme modification that basically removes the distinction beyond, essentially, “medium plus”. Even in a Remaster.

Look at how Flying ancestries have been published: piecemail with like 1-foot flight at Level One, scaling to minutes per day, hours per day, with actual full-fledged flight waiting until Level Seventeen!

I'm just mad that lizardfolk have to be level 17 to be beeg, but if I played a construct instead I could be beeg at level 13. I want to be beeg lizard.