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.
It use Cha if you want that?<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? Yeah, getting to use the worst stat in the game instead of one of the best isn't a feature.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recall knowledge mainly. I think it's the best user of it with keen recollection and known weakness.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? That's really niche. That niche can even be niche as RK can be wildly different in importance from table to table.
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.
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. 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.
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. -----
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.
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 workload it creates is likely a bad thing for PF2 in the long run as it will be hard to write new and exciting classes, feats, and spells for such a constrained system.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 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. |
