I Ate Your Dice's page

In a slightly less likely-to-be deleted post, what if we use 'essence' and 'upbringing'. Essence is literally what you are and upbringing is what shaped you as an individual.

Dice I hate rolling:

D100's (ask your parents if you don't know what this one is)

Besmirch not the name of the mighty (and terribly unstable and difficult to read) golf ball.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

I can certainly see where Paizo got their inspiration for designing Hexes for the Witch in PF2; that Focus Spell is extremely bad compared to most other Sorcerer Focus Spells that are actually pretty decent. Yikes.

There are a lot of limited or niche use level 1 focus spells across all classes. Jealous Hex certainly isn't the worst one. That honor probably goes to Dim the Light.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

As for why not, it's simply because you're suggesting that a class that is specifically designed to be slinging hexes around is actually worse at slinging hexes around than a class that has a "subclass" choice to do so.

And that isn't quite what I am saying.

For myself, I have no aversion to using the Witch class for slinging Hexes around. I find it to be quite satisfying. Though I do freely admit that there are some mechanical problems with the class that could use fixing.

But if you do have problems with the Witch class, or any other class, the solution may not be to tinker with the class or gripe about how it isn't rewarding enough or isn't reliable enough compared to other classes that you like better. The solution may instead be to play a class that you like the mechanics of better. The core classes (aside from Alchemist) are all fairly reliable and can be played effectively with a minimum of system mastery.

So I am not saying that Witch is worse at slinging Hexes than a Sorcerer. I am saying that a Sorcerer has lower system mastery and lower team synergy needed in order to play optimally. So it may be a better choice for inexperienced players or powergamers.

Or we go back to PF1 and allow players enough freedom to fix those issues themselves. If your build is bad, you can always fix it by looking for the feats to bring it back towards contributing well. In PF2 if your concept isn't working there aren't many options to fix things.

To the Overwhelming Soul back and forth, I'll just add that my experience with it was that my at-the-time girlfriend played one in a party of 7, and was out-DPSing the Bloodrager, Paladin, Unchained Rogue, and tied with the 2 pistols Gunslinger we had. My opinion of the archetype (and class on a whole) was that it was FREAKING BROKEN AS ASMODEAS and thus think highly of it.

Your entire party was made up of some of the least powerful classes in PF1. If you thought an Overwhelming Soul was good, I shudder to picture what a good class would have done to your game.

Playable is a low bar. I mean Rogue was playable but it doesn't match up to unchained rogue. It's one of those archetypes that actively makes you worse, like Oozemorph.

I don't consider either version of the Rogue in PF1 to be especially playable. I a world where I could be a Wizard or a Cleric, it's just hard to measure up.

I mean it works; I won't deny it works because it is still 10d6 damage on a standard action. But it shows the problem of removing burn wholesale, which is you lose everything that makes the class fun.

This might just be my 3.5 side showing, but is 10d6 damage on a standard action meant to be good?

Just, as an example, Path of War classes can do stuff like:

Sting of the Cobra

By focusing destructive, life-destroying ki into his attack, the Steel Serpent disciple strikes at the very heart of his foe’s life force. The disciple makes an attack against a target. If successful the strike inflicts an additional 8d6 points of damage and 2d4 points of Constitution damage (Fortitude save DC equal to 18 + initiation modifier to halve this Constitution damage). Upon a failed save, on the following two rounds the corrupted ki energies inflict an additional 2d6 points of damage and 2 additional points of Constitution damage. This is a supernatural ability.

-----

Spinning Adamantine Axe

With a powerful leap into the air, the disciple of the Broken Blade unleashes a powerful spinning kick to his surrounding foes that strikes with the force of a hurricane. The initiator makes one unarmed attack against each foe in range, each successful strike inflicting an additional 10d6 points of damage that ignores the target’s damage reduction. Foes that are struck are also knocked prone from the force of this assault.

-----

Meteoric Crash

By rushing at a foe like a blazing comet through the sky, the Primal Fury disciple crashes through an opponent to sculpt the battlefield into a field of carnage. The initiator makes a bull rush attempt as part of a charge with a +4 bonus (this bonus stacks with the +2 bonus from making a charge); if successful, the initiator inflicts 10d6 points of damage to the target as part of the bull rush and if the target is pushed back more than 10-ft., they are knocked prone on a failed Reflex save (DC 18 + initiation modifier) and he may make an immediate attack of opportunity against his prone foe. In initiator must be able to follow or reach the target to make this attack of opportunity.

-----

Yes, they're maneuvers and can't be used round over round but you start with 10 readied every fight and can refresh them fairly easily. I could also just look at a proper full caster, Summoner (Chained), Alchemist and see a similar level of baseline performance. So yeah, what else ya got?

A false perception. My assertation was that Soul "isn't so bad", or to put it more formally, there are a limited range of builds at which it performs decently. I'm unsure how you read that as outperforming all other classes.

The claim that "in order for the archetype to work, it has to be *better* than the alternatives" does not have a clear framing. Are you saying that it has to be better in some areas, or flatly superior to all alternatives?

It must do something better than the alternative archetypes to qualify as playable. PF1 has such a power curve that "good enough" rarely justifies play.

I Ate Your Dice wrote:

Artificial 20 wrote:

<snip>

I basically see you arguing to Gray that Overwhelming soul is as good as the base class, but in order for the archetype to work, it has to be *better* than the alternatives. So, aside from not needing to manage the burn mechanic, what does Overwhelming Soul do better than other classes?

It use Cha if you want that?

Yeah, getting to use the worst stat in the game instead of one of the best isn't a feature.

<snip>

I basically see you arguing to Gray that Overwhelming soul is as good as the base class, but in order for the archetype to work, it has to be *better* than the alternatives. So, aside from not needing to manage the burn mechanic, what does Overwhelming Soul do better than other classes?

Thanks for the answers so far. I think I get it although it does make me sad that what people want is the theme of the class not the actual class.

That's just realistic given that no class came to PF2 completely the same. Kineticist as a class has more bits that are unlikely to translate than most classes so people are trying to distill the class down to a core that can be made to fit PF2. If you want exactly the PF1 class, I suspect that you will have to play Pf1 or attempt the conversion yourself.

There's actually a bunch of answers to this question.

1) Basic Accessibility- The number of things you have to look at and pay attention to during character creation are one of the biggest barriers to entry for a TTRPG system; allowing people to focus on a specific subsection of gear makes the transition smoother.

2) Loot Distribution- It makes it easier to distribute loot in adventures where "magic marts" aren't going to come up often. Sure, you might still have a party of 4 leather armor wearers, but generally you'll see a more even dispersal of unarmored/light/medium/heavy characters and so a pre-published adventure writer can know that if they put about 25% of the defensive loot targeting each of those categories in an adventure, it'll work pretty smoothly for most groups without creating additional burdens for the GM.

3) Character Creation- Am I champion with heavy armor and is my god anyone other than Erastil? I probably don't need to put points into Dexterity and should just grab the heaviest armor I can find. Am I a rogue who just got Thievery for free and can only wear light armor? Then I get the best light armor for my build. Individually these elements aren't major cognitive loads, but collectively they can snowball along with other pieces of the game into a real barrier for new players.

4) Intentional Design- If you put e.g. Iomedae's Armor in a book as a cool champion item, you want it to have a strong theme and story but also to be useful to the majority of champions; part of that means you want the majority of champions to not just be able to wear heavy armor, but to have incentive to do so. Same things with class items for any other class. There's a huge appeal to focused, flavorful items with rich stories, but to make sure those items and stories reach the people who want them, you need a framework that ensures they're relevant to the majority of the target players.

5) Aesthetic and Internal Consistency- As Stephen Radney-McFarland once said (and I have no idea if he was quoting someone) fantasy is a language, and people may not always know when they're speaking it but they sure the hell know when someone's speaking it wrong. An extant example of this would be monks being able to use shields as competently as anyone else. This strikes a raw nerve with a fair number of folks despite being a pretty minor thing that won't even impact all games. The number of people who are going to be even more put off if the best bards are in full plate and the best champions are in leather constitutes a much larger percentage of the audience. As much as I loathe the word "verisimilitude" when it comes to TTRPG design (it should never trump "fun" and most people who bandy it about aren't even talking about historical accuracy, they're just talking about their personal fantasy preferences and favorite media), there is an extant to which the game world needs to make sense to the person interacting with it, and armor categories associating with character role and flavor has deep roots in the fantasy zeitgeist pretty much regardless of what your point of entry is.

Thanks for the answer.

This is pretty much what I expected to hear. The design of PF2 is very neatly stacked into things that your class can do natively, things they can do with a little investment, and off theme builds that take system mastery and creativity to make viable. This is very stable and predictable as well as being streamlined so most players can slide in and build something functional on their first or second try. If I was making a game for mass-market appeal I would likely make the same choices.

I just like messy and deep systems. I'm the player that sees a nice à la carte point-buy character system and skill-based combat and get excited. I'm one for open rules that swing for the fences, even the ones that miss often do something interesting that shines when patched into another system.

That's why to me the Unchained designs were one of the best parts of PF1. I know it's unlikely to come any time soon (and possibly not at all) but I'd be very excited to see what a PF2: Unchained supplement might bring to the table. Not just to see what a second pass at some classes could do but to see what years of system mastery can let you get away with in terms of pushing limits.

In any case, keep being awesome.

Do you still don't notice these are Schrödinger post they exists and don't exist at same time until some one opens it and check. When you openend the forum decides that they don't exist. Some time after when other people entered the forum decide that they exist!

That just happened with your post. I saw a new post, checked the thread, didn't see anything, and then I refreshed the page to see the new post that should have already been there. Magic.

I get the feeling that a lot of players would have more fun with PF2 if it wasn't so keen to silo everything and loosened up on niche protection. You can keep 90% of the balance and gain many times the number of viable builds by doing this.

Here's a fundamental question that I rarely see asked, what does armor proficiency by armor type bring to the game? What harm is done by opening up armor availability?

Fundamental runes are a decent compromise between people who would rather progress solely through levels and use items as build enablers and sidegrades (myself and, presumably, you) and people who want to get bigger and fancier magic swords throughout their campaign (enough survey respondents that Paizo wasn't going to ignore them).

They really aren't any compromise though as they are *more* required than any single item in PF1 was. You could get by with a set of +1 weapons of various materials in PF1 because an extra +4 to hit and damage were often merely cherries on top of what was actually pumping your attack and damage rolls. For armor, you could get by with whatever gave you the best fortification you can afford.

PF2 swung and missed with that and ABP isn't integrated enough to be an easy default option for most APs.

I Ate Your Dice wrote:

You start by setting the base armor for each category, that's the boring one that's good if you don't have a use for the special traits other armors at that tier get. Then you make two armors that give less AC but have some positive traits that could make up for it. Then you make armor with better AC that has drawbacks that some classes can overcome and others can't.

This is... fundamentally not how armor class works in PF2. The drawbacks would have to be monumental to not just always take the armor type with the best AC rating.

Why do we need to be tied to a system that leads to boring binary results?

You can make a more interesting system that isn't any harder to resolve than the current system that has more room for interesting mechanics. Like armor that provides a penalty to avoiding attacks but which absorbs more damage. Or armor that gives a limited ability to force an enemy to reroll their damage dice. Nothing that would be unbalanced but just enough difference that you can more easily play out certain archetypes.

The closest to an item you need to have whatever your build, except for the fundamental runes, are the Healer's gloves.

Hardly broken IMO.

Fundamental runes were a mistake and are the worst thing in the game.

I guess people love weapons far more. And it's nothing new : Mjolnir, Gungnir, Durandal, Excalibur are not the names of armors.

Aegis, Pridwen, and Svalinn are all famous shields and then the various armors tended to be named for those who wore them.

I agree. Armors could have been as diverse and interesting as weapons but they just aren't and shields, well it was obvious they got rushed when dents went out the window and nobody seems to want to fix that. The worst part is that making interesting armor is easy.

You start by setting the base armor for each category, that's the boring one that's good if you don't have a use for the special traits other armors at that tier get. Then you make two armors that give less AC but have some positive traits that could make up for it. Then you make armor with better AC that has drawbacks that some classes can overcome and others can't.

Test that. If it's balanced see if you can slip in another set of armor into each category or if your base armor has room to be made more interesting.

If you're willing to slaughter sacred cows you can make it so armor absorbs damage and shields and dexterity make you more difficult to hit. Then you have a lot more room for interesting trade-offs and can even design armor that has DR against some damage types and weaknesses to others so warriors have some ability to prepare defenses and pick weapons for use against known threats.

Making a game more interesting than the one Paizo gave us isn't difficult, they just got cold feet a few too many times and played a lot of things safer than they needed to.

Feat Tax? Not really at the strength some are talking about. Is Fleet, Improved Initiative or Toughness a Feat Tax?

Yes. Anything that is so good as to punish players who take other options is a tax and good design would eliminate as many such taxes as possible.

I don't get why saves weren't done as:

Fortitude: Str or Con
Reflex: Dex or Int
Will: Cha or Wis

Then it's impossible to have bad saves unless you're dumping paired stats; and at that point, I'd say it just makes sense for that character to have such a flaw.

Who is Riot Games and why should I care about them?

Like it's incredibly disingenuous to compare the expense and difficulty in "maintaining your own server" for whatever it is you're talking about, and "talking to your players and figuring out solutions to problems that come up in the course of play."

Just an indie studio that came from nothing to running one of the largest e-sports leagues in the world because they weren't afraid to invest in what was working and cut what wasn't. Hosting your own server is easy, you do it unknowingly when you play a fair number of online games that use the P2P server model rather than dedicated servers.

As for talking to your players and making house rules, how does that work for PFS players or pay-to-play players who have a strict GM that doesn't want different rules for each game they run? More importantly, how does Paizo not handling errata properly make the game better for the player?

Paizo isn't your friend, you should be holding their feet to the fire to make the best game possible and not accepting second-rate work because they're running on a tight budget and working within an outdated business model. To those that think I'm being too harsh, I'm more critical of the company I work for than I am of Paizo. Don't get me wrong, I like my company just fine, I just think that my staff and our customers deserve the best instead of our best, and am willing to fight for that change.

I don't think that a divide is inevitable with more thorough errata through online means. I doubt changes would create a fissure big enough that the physical copies become fossils. As long as they don't completely disregard reprints, It should be fine.

I remember 3.0 and going online and printing off errata and FAQs and slipping them into the front cover of books. It wasn't ideal but it got the job done.

I fail to see why "Paizo updates their game regularly to fix problems" is a better solution than "I, the GM, solve problems via house rules."

I fail to see why "Riot games makes frequent balance changes" is a better solution than "modding the game and using private servers". The company that makes the product is the one that should fix it. Period.

Paizo's entire business model is print subscriptions and they frequently speak about how essential brick-and-mortar stores are to how they stay afloat, but by all means, act smug about it for no reason.

Then they need to rapidly change that model because it is going to be increasingly difficult to sustain going forward. Even large companies dominating their fields are moving towards having a substantial digital footprint. Some examples are WotC investing heavily in MtG Arena and digital content for D&D, Games Workshop moving to frequent balance updates and Warhammer+, and even smaller companies like R Talsorian games investing heavily into digital releases. The future is digital, it's app-based, and it's having your character sheet on your phone or tablet. Companies that aren't already working on these products will have a hard time in the years to come and no amount of conservative grognards will change this.

“There are two Pathfinder Second Editions that are nearly identical” is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a while. You’re begging to split the fandom, arguably as badly as an edition change would, but with remarkably little benefit, and also making print - and all the retailers who move print product - a second-class of community.

Have you looked at how bookstores and comic shops are doing since the turn of the Millenium? If you have you'd see that printed media is already second class to the audiobook and pdf. You might not like the trend, but things are moving to digital distribution and living systems with frequent hands-on development even for thinngs that were traditionally single print run products.

Maybe I should reword the first part. Even if we agree that issues should be fixed, we still have yet to agree on what constitutes an issue.

I was mistaken in making such a blanket statement. But, your Mario example points back to my previous point in this post. I'd take the side of, it just is a thing you can do and move on.

To say that mods for video games is more prevalent than houserules for PnP games is a very interesting claim. I presume that PnP games with zero houserules are a distinct minority.

Are you claiming that PF2 is a game that is nearly unplayable due to the issues you perceive it has?

Much as it is with bugs, there will be some issues that are obvious; printing issues, typographical errors, etc. For these kinds of issues, we should always expect correctio via errata as soon as possible.

Then you get things working other than intended. These are more of a grey area and can be harder to spot but these are the kinds of things that can be discovered via user feedback and by having staff read these forums as part of the errata building process. The team can then decide which of these issues are bugs and which are unintended features and it would be excellent if they gave us documentation about which are which and what the distinctions are.

Finally, you get balance changes. These are always tricky and even games that get bi-weekly updates can struggle with this. For a PnP game, you have far fewer data points to work with but can and should look at what players think of as the strongest and weakest options. Then you do your job as game designers and try to figure out if the players are correct and if so if an elegant fix can be implemented. Give the players some feedback about this process and most will accept that you've given it a go and fixed what you can.

This is a lot of work, perhaps more than Paizo is capable of but it's important work. It's also the kind of thing that I could see WotC doing going forward as a way to crush smaller games that are gnawing at their market share. They can do what large studios have done in the video game space and simply set the bar for a certain quality of life changes so high that you either match them, go out of business, or restructure to live within the indy sphere.

What they are talking about is the, "everything is fine because there is this one thing in one book that is helpful if you know it exists." Not the availability of new items of equal power.

I get that's where it started, but that narrow example actually one that will tend to expand to touch more and more classes as time goes on. A weapon or magic item enables a class (or smoothes over an issue) in such a way that the class with the item is above where it is without it. For an example look at what the flickmace does for characters who can use it effectively and what the next best replacement looks like compared to that.

Unless we expect perfectly safe and boring item design, even more so than we already get, this will always happen to some extent, and when it does any buff to the class that has access to whatever the item is becomes untenable in the face of that specific combination. Given that you can't predict when such a combination might arise with any real accuracy it may be that Paizo doesn't want to risk errata that might balance something now and break it later.

It's not the approach I would take, but Paizo won't commit to monthly errata and Q&A so it's likely the best approach for them to take.

The Raven Black wrote:

Didn't know about Starfinder working that way, but that is also what they have been doing, very gradually, for PF2. A good example is the Shadow signet to boost spell attacks.

IMHO, the issue with that design philosophy that it requires system mastery. A new player might not even realize that Shadow Signet was an option.

It is like having a recipe for fruit cheesecake on volume 1 of a cooking book and a note on the middle volume 2 that mentions that passion fruit is to sour so a little extra sugar might be better on passion fruit cheesecake.

It is Ivory Tower design all over again.

That's going to happen as you add new items and equipment regardless of how tight the balance is. The only way to prevent it is to make all new items strictly worse than core items and to never add equipment with new functionality over the life of a game. I don't expect that either option will help Paizo to sell new books once people realize that everything in them is just CRB but weaker.

Ok so this whole debate has gotten me interested enough that I cracked out the ole excel.

I propose running each class through a simple scenario:

The contestant starts 25 ft. away from Dummy 1, Dummy 2 is 35ft. away, Dummy 3 is 50 ft. away. The contestant must hit dummy 1 on round 1, dummy 2 on round 2, dummy 3 on round 3. At the end of round 2, dummy 3 moves next to dummy 2. For melee, Dummies are considered flat-footed to represent the melee flanking advantage.

There are many ways that we could do this differently, but I feel this represents a fairly standard scenario. Open a door, roll ini, move in to flank, hit, move in to second target, hit, then its a big melee so you don't have to move.

Without further, ado, here are our contestants:

What changes if the battle is started at a 35 ft. distance instead of 25 ft. without any other changes to the scenario?

It is not exactly the same. Firstly, not all issues are agreed that they are issues. Bugs in a game are easily identified as bugs.

This is complete nonsense.

As an example, is climbing a vine while carrying an item in Super Mario World a bug, a feature, or a harmless glitch? Would patching it improve the game for most players?

Secondly, video games require a vast amount more expertise to tweak than PF2, a game made to be tweaked.

Yes but because of this mods become far more standardized and accepted with communities than house rules for PnP games do. In such a way you end up with foundational mods that only fix bugs and enable other mods to function being almost required for some games.

Get 20 specially crafted potion flasks designed to fit snuggly into the cauldron. In a 5-man party prepare 5 batches of 4 different potions. Fit them with stoppers that have straws coming out of them at average PC mouth level and of a length that they can be reached without leaning into the cauldron; this works far better if your party is all close to the same height. Color code the straws to match the potion they draw from.

This should allow a character to get next to the cauldron and spend an action to suck on a straw and get a potion. The issue is that they don't have a way to mark that the potion they used is now empty. Perhaps solve this by having everybody wear lipstick that rubs off on the straws to mark them.

Or, in reality, realize that any plan that takes this many steps won't work unless the GM lets it and work with them on finding a reasonable middle ground.

If you look up words of power all you will find is people saying that the system is weird. Weird for players to use who will 90% just use the same list of spellls. Weird for the GM that has to deal with it. Its just choice paralysis central even more than regular spells.

That type of system works well in books and games because you aren't playing with other people and so it flows. But when you have to sit down and wait for the person to pick what they want every single time...

I have never experienced that and I have written my own skill-based magic systems for games that didn't have their own. I don't think I had a table of super players either. I just made sure that they had a list of the magic they could use and what it would take to use it with their character sheet and they told me when they wanted to use it and made the rolls.

I'm amazed that so many people on these forums seem to play with players I would kick from my table in a heartbeat and think their antics are normal. Slow players kill games, when I've had them as guests at my table I give them a few sessions to learn and then start putting their turns on a timer if it remains an issue. If a payer just won't use their class features, that's on them, they can be a passenger until they figure out the character that they built for themselves.

As a GM, or even as a player, it's okay to put your foot down and say that player x is causing issues and that those issues needed to be fixed or one of you won't be coming back to the table.

Thats sounds like Words of Power. Which was not a well liked system given that it was printed once and never again.

The question is, who didn't like it? If it was the players, that's fine don't go there again. If it was the devs, I think they need to suck it up and give it another go.

Ok, but what is the kind of magic system are we comparing it to? Generally when we talk about killing a sacred cow, we have something in mind to replace it.

Like 5e magic (neo-vancian) is arguably 'simpler' but it loses a lot of definition in the individual because it doesn't have room for meaningful differences between casting styles. It also, in practice, made the casters in the game dramatically overpowered.

I liked 4e with its power system but from what I understand, most people hated it much worse than they ever hated Vancian.

We have the 'alternative magic' in this game, but some of them, like bounded are just new configurations of vancian spell slots, and others like the Thaumaturge just put a magic coat of paint on a martial (which isn't a knock against it, its great in context), the cantrip and amp model is neat, but I don't think we should do that for every caster.

5e has a spell point variant, e.g. mana, and we know how that works out more or less-- the casters hoard points for the biggest effects because they don't have bespoke resources for smaller effects.

Most Video Games use Spell Point systems, but have casters that might as well be martials, and over time, often end up just using cooldowns anyway.

An item centric resource casting system would likely be more restrictive, rather than less.

Rules-Lite narrative games tend to elide the casting entirely into their moves, when you cast a spell to solve a problem you just roll the 'solve the problem' dice.

Honestly, I think of Vancian Magic as a 'vegetable mechanic' its something that isn't always exciting by itself, but the way it works is load bearing in holding up other fun parts of the game-- its fun in context, because it does a good job of giving us lots of desirable results.

Also, personal experience? the players who have a hard time with Vancian are generally the same players that always hate popping the rulebook open, and thematic builds are an outgrowth of how many spells you have in the system than the basic casting style (again, unless you go with 'Solve the Problem' rolls.)

How about cribbing from Burning Wheel (and many other systems) and making spells into skills where you roll a skill test and then can spend degrees of success to generate results. The broadness of these skills and what they can accomplish is a lever that can be tuned to balance things.

You could also do something with spheres or base spell components and make it take an action to add them to a spell. For example, the sphere of fire might add fire damage to a spell, boost a physical attribute, or cleanse an ailment when paired with healing. You then tune these numbers until they generate the results you like. Optionally you can then show which combinates create classic Vancian spells of editions gone.

I Ate Your Dice wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

Now, I will never say that the class is strong or whatever (so comparison with Fighter is a bit useless), but I don't think a melee Investigator has to be worse than a ranged one. It's just that you have to build it to its strength when the ranged Investigator kind of build itself on its own.

So how does a melee Investigator compare to a Rogue or even a Bard as a skill monkey? Do they pull their weight in combat compared to these two utility-focused classes? If they don't manage to be good skill monkeys and we already agree that they aren't good in combat then what does the Investigator do to avoid being an Alchemist tier failure of a class?

Recall knowledge mainly. I think it's the best user of it with keen recollection and known weakness.

That's really niche. That niche can even be niche as RK can be wildly different in importance from table to table.

Now, I will never say that the class is strong or whatever (so comparison with Fighter is a bit useless), but I don't think a melee Investigator has to be worse than a ranged one. It's just that you have to build it to its strength when the ranged Investigator kind of build itself on its own.

So how does a melee Investigator compare to a Rogue or even a Bard as a skill monkey? Do they pull their weight in combat compared to these two utility-focused classes? If they don't manage to be good skill monkeys and we already agree that they aren't good in combat then what does the Investigator do to avoid being an Alchemist tier failure of a class?

TBT my first 3.5 character was for Living Arcanis. She oozed with flavor and was awesomely good at her shtick (social encounters). But she was so bad at fighting that she was useless most of the RL time we spent on playing.

A concept and character you're passionate about is not enough. You also need to feel you're not a dead weight that the other characters have to carry most of the time.

Thankfully, in PF2, any character will be viable unless you purposefully build them not to be.

And the AP guides + discussing with the GM will be quite enough to make sure your character gets the chance to shine.

I figured that was implied by "can see yourself being interested in months down the road". If your character isn't useful for a large chunk of IRL time each session, that's going to make sustaining interest difficult for most players.

A good character isn't the one that best fits with the other characters at the table and it isn't the one painstakingly written to fit the adventure, it's the one that you can RP well and can see yourself being interested in months down the road. You don't need 14 pages of backstory and 100 back and forth messages with the DM to get it perfect. Just ensure that you've left some dangling threads at the end of your character's personal plot for the DM to tie back to the game at hand.

A lot of players that want to be helpful can actually annoy the GM by monopolizing their time. If the GM doesn't seem concerned about your character fitting in, then you shouldn't either. Just do what the GM asks you to do, clarify if you need to, and stop overthinking things.

I Ate Your Dice wrote:

You aren't going to woo over a new player by telling them that PF2 has finally fixed the caster versus martial divide and made high-level play a lot more enjoyable.

You woo over a new player by telling them you are running PF2 so it's PF2 or find a new GM.

And GMs love PF2 because it's balanced, because the promise of getting up to 20 is more than a promise, and because they save work when playing PF2 once they took the time to learn the rules.

Get the GMs, you'll get the players. And GMs are very rarely beginners.

As a GM, the balance of the system hasn't convinced me to force PF2 on my table, we're all friends so we talk about which systems we're looking to play. There's always some level of compromise in those discussions but those are forgotten once characters are written and dice start rolling. I don't GM for internet randos and don't play PFS or other PUG-type games.

I guess that if I did I could insist on PF2 but I suspect my tables would fill quicker if I was willing to run 5e and disallow the worst exploits and that level of balance is good enough for me. Given that I GMed for 3.x and PF1 tables, also with a close group of friends, I find the crying about 5e's imbalances a little overblown.

For me the balance is one of selling points of 2E over D&D that helps me to keep playing it. Maybe not all players care about this but this is a market niche where's D&D always failed to achieve. The other differential where's 2E attacks is about customization. Even with all complaints about "I cannot do my character just like I want without risk to turning it less efficient" yet your have way more customization capacity than any D&D edition without abandoning the class+race selection concept and turning the system in a GURPS' like game.

In D&D the maximum you can do is choose a race, class, subclass and if you want trade some stats for some feats. In the end is less customizable than 3.5 and far less than pathfinder and far way less than PF2.

D&D 5e plays things very safe and has built its market on making D&D easy. It's the mobile game of the market in that a lot of people play it a little and some people play it a lot and buy all the books. It's not a high bar to clear to be better than 5e in terms of character customization.

Of course, I don't think you have more customization in PF2 than you had in PF1 or 3.x, but the customization you have is easier to use and has less risk of being overly powerful or completely worthless. If you use the full scope of what the older systems had to offer and are willing to play the occasional low-tier builds only campaign you find that the system can do a lot but asks a lot of both the players and GMs to make it work. This is obviously worse for organized play and pick-up games but can work well with a tight-knit group of players.

-----

I think it might be a selling point, it is frequently brought up on reddit by people who are transitioning over from 5e which is itself a frequent occurrence-- and it was the feedback I got just the other night as a GM for Beginner Box day from a group of long time PF1e players, that they felt like it was way better balanced and they enjoyed that it was more authentically difficult when it was supposed to be. Meanwhile the dndnext sub is consistently getting upset over the lack of balance in that game. I recently went 150 positive karma on a post there discussing how pf2e fixes a major frustration they have there with martials and casters-- the problem itself being major enough that it topped the sub with a whopping 1.8k net karma, which is a significant number of people.

The 'wider market' for 5e is hard to identify, especially when you factor in the people that buy the core book, play a few sessions and then move on with their lives entirely. When it comes up it often feels like people are trying to invoke the 'silent majority' that happens to agree with them, whereas I suspect that impression of 5e's wider market is based on the massive wave of new players that it brought to the table, who aren't actually evergreen, some of them have quite a bit of experience now and are developing frustrations with the system-- in that sense I would say the system's strength is that the problems it has are 'backloaded' you don't start to notice until you play for a while, or start hanging out in the community, which makes it perfect for getting people into the system, and developing a sunk cost to exiting it once they start to notice that the walls are cracked under the paint.

I'm inclined to agree with something Stephen Glicker said in a Roll for Combat stream, there are 'Pathfinder People' who don't know they're Pathfinder people in the DND community, basically people who need their rules to be precise and balanced (say, they need one class to mostly keep up with another class to think of it as viable) and right now you're seeing a lot of friction from them in the 5e community that is to PF2e's benefit, since it caters to that niche. I don't think its the only camp though, I think you also have some of the lighter, fuzzier people getting frustrated with how crunchy 5e is, and how much time is spent on combat and learning combat rules-- and those people are probably going to gradually move over to Story Now and other movements that prefer lite systems. Out of the remaining people, a solid chunk seem to be developing more of a low power, gritty, OSR bent as well, although I don't think that crowd has self-realized to the same extent.

Of course, the people that come to PF2 from other systems will come over for PF2's balance. That's PF2's entire thing.

The issue with that is the system's balance won't appeal to people who haven't already played another system. You aren't going to woo over a new player by telling them that PF2 has finally fixed the caster versus martial divide and made high-level play a lot more enjoyable. You will woo them over by telling them about the awesome moments your character had against Chebilax the Putrescent, Lord of all that Decays, and PF2's system works against any given character having been the decisive factor in a level +3 encounter.

There's also the fact that PF2 won't catch everybody who leaves D&D behind and that being the cleanup crew to another more popular system isn't the way to sustainability or a lead in market share. Paizo does a fairly bad job of advertising and getting brand recognition, they don't tend to innovate by bringing new technology into the gaming space, and they're terrible at errata and fixing issues players have with their game. For every good thing PF2 does, Paizo seems to fire two bullets into their feet.

Also on the point of balance and the perception that paizo is being too harsh on it.

I say good for them and that that is preferable.

Don't forget the that base rules are that, the base rules. They must be as tightly balanced as possible because then they create the meat and bones of the system to allow us, as GM's, to extrapolate from there and adjust/adapt/homebrew stuff.

Despite pf2e being excellent, I still have 10-15 house rules per game, and I change them as we game.

I allow tumble through as part of a stride, I made disarm a non MAP, I allow diagonal flanking, I allow hero points reroll on damage rolls, I allow bandoliers to give you 1 free action draw from an item in there once per round to favor using consumables. This and much more.

But I'm happy my tweeks aren't part of the core, I'm not sure if they're balanced! I like that the base rules are common ground to allow us to grow from there.

Aside from fixing gross imbalances, I'm not sure I can agree with the balance first mindset. I can see why it would be prevalent on these forums but game balance has never had a large impact on a system's sales or its lasting appeal. I think this large focus on balance and the added

If this was pushing strong sales it could make sense but I don't think PF2 is really selling to the wider market on the strength of its balance. Especially when D&D 5e is still selling well with its 'meh, good enough' levels of balance.

I'm in the same boat as the OP myself. I keep getting ideas for a character that's cool and seems to fit with PF2's mechanics, but then as I build it I keep noticing all the little obstacles that make it less good than I'd like it to be. To me, the level of balance the system goes for seems to overshadow everything else about it and it makes everything I try to build come off as less than the sum of its parts. This is likely just a perspective issue and an issue of having spent too long reading about the system and too little time actually playing it but it is a hurdle to overcome.

I find that my biggest issue with PF2 is that it can be had to get excited about anything because the balance is so tight. Even the classes that seem cool - here's looking at you Magus and Swashbuckler - take so much effort to do their unique thing that I find my heart's just not it when I try to build them. I wish that PF2 had more than its tight balance and the 3-action system (which feels underused) to hang its hat on.

I'll also freely admit that my table isn't that big on rules-heavy games and that of our group I'm the only one who feels overly confined by 5e. I've made a few suggestions for other systems we could play that didn't get any traction. However, it's looking like the compromise is bringing Morrus' Level Up to our table to see if that broadens the system enough for me while keeping it simple for them.

I'm fine with plans backfiring. I'm less fine with the social treatment and too-high DCs.

GMs and players that actively oppose creative thinking are in the wrong hobby.

It really seems like your playstyle didn't mesh well with the group. From their perspective, I'd bet it felt as if you were taking the spotlight too often and trying to work solo in too many fights. I can see why they were happy to let a 'problem character' die when they had the chance.

PF2 monk is pretty good, but I think 4e's Monk did a better job carving out its own identity and PF1's uMonk was pretty fantastic too.

I find myself missing style strikes quite a bit and Ki-as-focus-spells feels kind of frustratingly limiting to me compared to how Ki works in PF1 or even 5e (though 5e's monk has some serious problems of its own).

I only played a few sessions of 4e before my group voted to move to PF1 to keep things familiar. Looking back, I think that 4e is actually pretty good and just needed better marketing and less visually bland rules to sell better. Heck, my current group might find it enjoyable if I could convince them to give it a shot.

The Unchained Monk, I have trouble seeing. Even if it does Monk stuff well I'm not sure how it earns its place in a caster-dominated game like PF1. I think I'd rather play something from the Path of War and re-flavor it than play any base-level martial class in PF1. Of course, YMMV, and if you got to see a uMonk in action at a high optimization table and saw that it worked out, who am I to question that.

Ideally, I'd like to see the Monk split into at least two classes (Martial Artist and Wuxia Weapons Master) with room for a 3rd (Wise Mystic) just to help clarify and tighten up the class a little bit. Even with that minor gripe in mind, I think the PF2 Monk is the best D&D adjacent Monk we've had yet. They're still a bit MAD but most PF2 classes are and their lack of focus doesn't hurt as much in a system where one builds wide more often than they build tall. The Monk is one of the bigger PF2 glow-ups coming in only behind the Fighter.

-----

Ravingdork, I'd be curious to hear the rest of that story. Based on your party taking a rest it seems like the party was already a bit banged up and your character being ahead caused a fight before the group was ready to go again. In that case, I'm with the party on not rushing in after you.

If they were all 100% healthy and good to go then there's not much excuse for not saving you, though OOC if they'd been asking you not to rush ahead and you kept doing it I can understand the motivations.

If I'm off-base and they were just being dicks, then I agree with everybody above in that you should find a new group. Heck, even if there were other circumstances you and the rest of the party clearly have different views on how to play so you might want to find a new group anyway.