So, backpacks only give you a convenient space to store up to 4 Bulk and still leave your hands free, right? As opposed to increasing your Bulk capacity by 4?
Good riddance to overpowered magic. It's still the best for raw ability later on, but at least the days of caster supremacy are mitigated. Magic needed to be nerfed hard so that everyone else could have stuff to actually do, and thankfully it's a lot better now. Long may 2E reign in that regard.
♫ ♪ I'm so excited
Maaan I'm so happy to see Fighters and Rogues be straight up better than other classes at things that are universally desirable. Weak attempts at niche protection are OUT.I hate that things that are universally desirable are niched out to certain classes. Why can't I have a cleric (or sorcerer or alchemist) with Legendary Perception? Its only the most important (non-skill, but really should be) skill in the game. Trapfinding isn't even locked behind the rogue anymore. I'm okay with some of it, but Perception is an issue for me, too. Monks, for example, are often noted for their keen insight, and their ability to see things that others cannot. I want my Monk to be able to have Legendary Perception. Heightened senses and keen perception in general are, to me, one of the most important abilities to have. One of my favorites. Is there no way for my Monk to ever have Legendary Perception?
Be ready for some sore arms after reading the CRB, it must weigh 3 pounds.Four and a half. What's its Bulk rating? ;)
Psst. I really didn't want to be THAT lady, but there's a slight typo on the Succubus. "These demons are can easily exploit..."
Forgive me is your example actually referring to something specific that has flown over my head? Blizzard Games is a great example of this exact thing. They had a record year...then fired 800 people, have all but completely sold their souls to the Chinese market and laws, tanked Heroes of the Storm (which was my favorite MMO), started focusing heavily on the mobile market (including an outsourced-to-China "Diablo" game that's just a reskin of an existing game), and basically forgot who they used to be. The company's nearly as bad as EA now. Hearthstone has some of the greediest lootbox-style mechanics ever seen in a game. "Sense of pride and accomplishment" indeed.
Gasp! But that's one more than a fortnight!
I never play human characters, either, and the idea of being limited in what classes I can take, and to what levels I can advance them, in comparison to the humans was frustrating. Or yeah, not being able to roll well enough to play a certain class is, while when I was a kid it was thrilling, now just an exercise in frustration and false exclusiveness. Of the many overarching assumptions 3E changed, more freedom and flexibility was one of the best.
And I want to point out that I'm fine with max. HPs, I just still might want to house-rule them in my games. I definitely do not want to return to days of rolling ability scores, that often resulted in bitterness when one of the guys rolled up an "elven hero" and the rest were playing farmboys with pitchforks. This expression comes from an Undermountain campaign years and years ago; one PC was an elven fighter with vastly superior stats (Str 18/96, Dex 18, Con 17, etcetera), while others had 14s or 15s in their prime attributes. It wasn't really fun to play in that particular campaign. I remember those days, as well. I started GMing at the tender age of...ten? With AD&D 2E, I think. I do remember the days of rolling my character's attributes, and HP, and I definitely don't miss it. I very much like the way that PF2E does it, myself. Rolling a 1 sucked. I know we were often allowed by one GM to reroll 1s, but then I would get a 2 or 3, and it just wasn't very fun. The rolls I want to matter are the ones taken for in-game actions, rather than vital character attributes. Even so, I do hope they have an option for you. The default assumption they're running with is much more to my taste, but it wouldn't take much word count to give you an optional rule you're looking for, I think.
That's not possible. It wouldn't even exist unless a PC was there looking for it, by those rules and the logical extension thereof. Unless the GM is literally rolling for every single possible item ahead of time, regardless of whether any PC ever even visits that shop, its existence remains in a state of flux even by PF1 rules until looked for by a PC.
I think the character, Brea, would be on a quest to find an unbreakable shield so that she could defend the entire world! Bonus points if it looks like the Hylian Shield.
So, the concept I threw together here is actually one that has interested me for a while. I'd like to make a warrior of some kind that only uses a shield—sometimes offensively, but really focuses on defense, being a bastion that doesn't break. What's the closest we can get to that in 2E, do you think? Even a warrior with the shield who can also heal her allies would be cool.
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Sometimes, I still hear the sounds. The fires, the shouting, the grunts and the laughter and the hooves. I remember when they came for us. Our little farming village wasn't prepared. Our warriors were too few. We had pitchforks, they had spears. We had slings, they had crossbows. We had swords, they had those terrible, terrible teeth. They burned and tore and shattered everything I ever knew. I saw something gleaming in the bloodstained grass. A shield, the only one we had. I picked it up, struggling under the weight of it. I watched as my people fell to the blades of the enemy. I watched as some fell on their own swords instead of being captured and dragged away. I watched as weapons drank life after life in the hands of the ruthless. I raised my shield and I screamed. Ten years later, and I still hear it. I hear it when I find a town under siege. When brigands raid in the night. When some spell goes awry and the dead rise. The only thing that quiets it is when I raise my shield. In honor of my people's memory. In defense of others. When I hear the clang of metal on metal, when I push back the monsters, then I push back the nightmares. I swore that day that I would never pick up a weapon. I would stand as a shield between the defenseless and the wicked. Those behind me would not fall as long as I could lift my shield-arm. And I have not stopped protecting those who cannot protect themselves since that day. So you think you can break me? I stand here still in defiance of your cruel might. I will not fall here today. They will not be yours to claim. Begone, for today you have met an impassable wall! You are but a droplet hurtling itself against the cliffs. I have weathered tidal waves. Begone, fiend, for my shield is unbroken. I am unbroken.
This is more or less just a repeat of your previous couple points but again I don't really get this one. A new player is less likely to make a broken character under the naive assumption the designers presented reasonable options for them to take and the game is less likely to collapse under heavy optimization, but that's not "little reward for system mastery"... that's just a system that's better balanced. This is a big one for me. "System mastery" should never be a thing. New groups shouldn't go to a book, pick stuff that looks cool and fun, only to find out that they made such a suboptimal choice the game is breaking around them. The idea of min-maxing every last +1 and that the game SHOULD have trap choices is, to me, so adversarial, and so antithetical to what I enjoy when playing with the rules, that if it disappeared entirely tomorrow the RPG world would be better for it.
Not much. It seems like a pretty straight downgrade from 1e across the board, and it's completely incompatible with my homebrew setting. Wow. Almost literally every single item you mention and every detail is the opposite of how I feel, and in fact all of these things are why I'm excited for 2E. You'll definitely be better off with 1E, and thankfully so, because if 2E was that much like 1E, I wouldn't be playing it.
Norrath could be a very fun game world, with both familiar races (elves, dwarves, halflings) and some funky additions of their own (iksar, erudites, etc.). Trolls and Ogres are another! I also liked how the races in EQRPG were very powerful. But I love the flavor and the abilities of the Iksar, and so I definitely have considered running stuff in that setting. One thing the EQRPG did that won't be done here, though I am hoping someone comes up with rules for it, is that it used a magic points system. But I don't think that's absolutely necessary. About the only quibble I've got with the setting is how many of it's evil gods are gods of stuff that nobody would worship, like fear or hate or disease. (Nobody names a day or month or planet after a Greek or Roman or Norse god of those things! Give me sun gods or war gods or love gods or gods of fate. Some of those can be evil, not gods of bad childish sith lord 'these feelings are bad' reductionist psychology!) Maybe not, but seeing what some folks "worship" (both literally and figuratively) in our world, I'm not so sure it's that unbelievable. However, this is an easy thing to fix, I think. One huge bonus to off-line play is having a GM who can skip you past the boring parts and zip right to the fun bits! Absolutely! Though one thing I am looking forward to doing is making the exploration parts fun and engaging, both mechanically and narratively. My Breath of the Wild-inspired game very much has exploration and survival stuff as a focus, and I think it'll work out very well.
Chrono Trigger (the greatest CRPG of all time!) does this a lot, and yes. I love love LOVE things that are engaging and dynamic in terms of environments and layered rules and setpieces. So, goblin archers standing atop a crumbling cliff that you can collapse with some well-placed shots. Part of the floor having given way to lava, and the smoke elementals keep weaving in and out of the noxious fumes. Giant spiders keep dropping down from the ceilings and stringing webs across the room, restricting movement—or you can cut the creatures struggling in their webs free (accidentally or intentionally!), introducing more chaos into the fight! Heck, you could roll on a small random table to see just WHAT you let free! This game can't come out soon enough. Wish they could bump up the release date! I want to get into a PBP, and I want to start mine!
What the Alchemist needs is an artifact version of Ana's biotic rifle in Overwatch. Load vials of elixirs into it and...shoot your friends. With healing! Or whatever.
And if you do want a sub, and can't afford it, I do try to give some away during Oblivion Oath, and I'll try to give some away during these too! Having just conquered homelessness and finally gotten into a place again, money is needless to say tight! So I am very interested in this. So it's on Twitch?
I think the game will work just fine for less combat-heavy games. The one I'm setting up now is very Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-inspired, in that a lot of it is going to be exploration, survival, and uncovering ruins and things (all of which I'll give XP for, in addition to combat), that kind of thing. But I like high fantasy, so I wouldn't want to really get rid of it. What you do is take inspiration from bigtime mythological stories and other media. If the PCs are now like gods, cool, get them involved directly in the machinations of the gods as peers, rather than mere uppity mortals who challenge them. Have them take on more abstract challenges. Starvation, wars over resources, plagues, natural disasters (on a vast scale). Have them go to other realms and do the things high-level PCs do. They can still face challenges that you can't just beat up and still need strategy to overcome, such as a league of gods, social upheaval, or that kind of thing. Even at lower levels, I don't tend to run games that are one fight after another. Not that there's anything wrong with such a game, but what I enjoy most is immersion in a high fantasy world, so I really strive to help bring it to life through exploration, interaction, and so on.
Wish I could get an advance copy to write a review or something! I'm impatient. I'm getting my game forum setup on RPOL, and I have lots of ideas for an exploration-and-survival-heavy game with underlying mystery and grand adventure seeds (a la Breath of the Wild). But not having the rules makes it tough to do more than put concepts together. This is gonna be one long brainstorm!
Nothing. That was going to be my response. I'm not interested in any of the PF1 rules. I don't play it currently because, although the Paizo folks seem like real class acts and they put high quality production values into their games, the rules in PF1 are not something I enjoy playing with. PF2 looks a heck of a lot more my speed and I'm very, very excited about it. I've even begun setting my "Breath of the Wild"-inspired game over on RPOL in anticipation of the rules coming out.
"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." The idea that "fail forward" inherently removes character agency is, I think, a completely backward way to look at it. Rather, the concept lends itself more readily to embodying player agency than anything. It's a way of saying "This action matters." Pass or fail, you're doing it because it has some kind of meaning to your part in the story. After all, if it didn't, you wouldn't be doing it. And "matters" doesn't even have to mean dice rolling. Your character may choose to give the last bit of water in their canteen to the haggard wanderer in the desert, only to find out that the wanderer was the son of a powerful lord having escaped his captors, and gain an ally in the region—and an enemy in those who kidnapped the prince. If the action matters, then the agency is in simply undertaking it, in being the reason that it matters. Nowhere in any great story do you see the heroes thwarted with no chance of learning from the event. In fiction, there is no such thing as a binary pass/fail upon which the entire narrative hinges. Failure often has more interesting consequences than successs. Frodo is captured in Mordor because they failed to sneak past Shelob. He's stabbed on Weathertop because they failed to avoid the Ringwraiths. And Sauron is defeated ultimately because he failed to account for someone thinking differently than him, that his enemies would only seek to destroy the Ring and not use it (thus falling prey to it). There are many, many thousands of examples of this. The concept of still gaining something, or being able to progress in some way, to change the game state and the story, that's what "failing forward" means. It doesn't mean "you just unlock the door anyway." If it wasn't important to have a chance of failure, you'd not bother rolling. Maybe you trigger a trap that looses an avalanche of rocks that damage the party but also the door, allowing the stronger characters to force it open. Maybe you alert the orcs on the other side, who open the door, but now you're in a fight you might have avoided. There are a lot of ways to do this, and not every single action ever needs to have such dramatic potential. But the idea that it removes player agency is, to me, strange, when "nothing happens" is the most agency-robbing result possible.
Jesikah, Elven Monk out in search of wisdom and growth, trying to make the world a better place by her journeys. Alyssah, her sister, a Druid who seeks a true connection with the primal wilds (and has a love for dinosaurs!). Seryna, an Elven Champion who adventures with bright steel and a brighter heart and smile. And a few others, mostly Elves, like a Sorcerer, maybe a Rogue or two!
Here's number four.That makes three of us now, and I can't wait.I'm looking forward to homebrewing an Eberron conversion. The new rules for ancestries are going to make so many things so much easier.Ahhh. I thought I was the lone one thinking of Eberron campaign uses for PF2. I'm looking forward to trying a couple different non-Golarion campaign settings. Forgotten Realms is one, but also Norrath of EverQuest. The EQRPG did some fun stuff with D20 back in the day, and the setting is amazing. Cabilis and the Iksar alone are going to be worth converting (the very first Ancestry I'm going to homebrew and share on the forums is the Iksar!). I want to do a very Breath of the Wild-inspired open-world kind of game. Lots of survival, exploration, and noncombat adventuring. Ancient mysteries to uncover, new vistas to find, all of which I plan to grant XP in the form of quest-style rewards. That's the cool part about it being standardized to 1000 XP. It makes this sort of thing easy. I'm looking forward to creating monsters of all stripes, because I love to do that. Customizing foes is so much fun to tinker with; being able to build NPCs and stuff the same way, if I choose, is so great. I can't wait. I'm looking forward to skills mattering now. To having stuff to do besides hit things or blast things. To finding a way to immerse my group and I in a fantasy setting and really breathe life into it, but by blending rules with narrative much more seamlessly than before. Most of all, I'm looking forward to playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition.
This is pretty much why I have grown to like a lot of the narrative-based games of recent years. It changes the dynamic. Binary pass/fail isn't as interesting to me as, say, FFG's Star Wars games, where you can fail but with some advantage, or succeed but with a complication, and the narrative that unfolds as a result makes the character's actions matter just that much more. It's a way of saying, "Your character has chosen to undertake this action, so it has meaning, whether you succeed or fail."
Looks good. I can't wait to really put all the exploration rules to the test. I've got a Breath of the Wild-inspired game I'd like to run, and I enjoy even whole sessions of non-combat, just exploring remote locations and ancient ruins, dealing with traps and environmental hazards, and taking in the scenery.
Looks amazing! I can't wait to create a character. As Elves and Monks are my favorite, I shall be creating Jesikah, an Elf Monk, who has completed her training and now journeys the world in search of wisdom, growth, and making the world a better place through her own self-improvement and discovery. While I have many characters I want to play, this is my favorite and the one I'm looking forward to playing most!
Gah! I can't wait any longer! I need to get back to some classic fantasy gaming and this is the system with which I want to do it!
I think that's one of the big parts of the issue, really. The Ranger (and the Rogue, to a lesser extent) need something to set them apart. Otherwise, we end up in "Why isn't this just a Fighter with a focus on two-weapon fighting and wilderness skills?" territory. Ideally, to me, the Ranger should be as different from a Fighter as is, say, a Monk. Which means lots of esoteric abilities and strengths not purely combat-aligned, but then again, I'm also of the opinion that Fighters should get access to lots of skills (and probably be called "Warrior" or something to represent a more holistic approach, like many historical warriors who were skilled combatants but possessed broad skill sets). I think it's possible to create a separate niche for Rangers and Rogues with Fighters, but it definitely needs something strong to ground its core identity as anything different. Even just being a scout isn't much of a niche; a high-perception Monk or Rogue or even a mage of some kind with access to lots of sensory magics could easily fulfill that role. Rangers need something strong.
Ranger is a person with bow (or twin scimitars) and a pet. That's the Core Identity of the class. Anything beyond that is projecting your personal preferences that aren't shared by people who associate the D&D range with the above archetype. There's nothing at all remotely "this is classic Ranger" about that. A Fighter could easily have a bow (and should) or twin scimitars, and why not a pet? "Rangers tend to be experts in ranged weaponry, graceful dual-wielding, hunting and wilderness skills, and the innate ability to bond with wild beasts" is a little more Ranger-ish, but just "two weapons/bow and pet" doesn't scream any kind of unique core identity to me. I like the idea of Rangers gaining access to spells or just getting more Monk-like mystical abilities tied to the wilderness, personally.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited, as long as they follow through on some of the promise of the new ideas. Skills having more epic high-level abilities associated with them (feats as in "actions of incredible skill" as well as the game mechanic feats) would be a good one. But every single design goal was, I think, a good one, and even if they didn't quite pull it off in some cases, that's just a matter of numbers tweaks. I wouldn't touch 3.x/D20/PF with a ten-foot pole, at this point. Too much work to try to make an extremely broken engine work properly. There are better options for my time. Fantasy Craft, maybe, or, if PF2E continues on the way it seems to be going, that'll definitely be my fantasy game of choice.
I'm not really talking about proficiency-gating. I'm just talking about it's not realistic or possible for someone to continuously try to break ropes or lift bars or something for hours on end without a break until they succeed or get a critical failure. That is where pure rules must take a backseat to any kind of narrative sense, unless that's not what you're after as a game experience. Which, fine if you are, but I'm not going to let characters sit and roll and roll and roll to lift a gate or something if it makes no dramatic sense. If there's no drama or storytelling need for them to fail, they can just succeed. If it's a combat or high-pressure situation, you can let them attempt a few times while events progress around them—a prison break or a fight breaks out, and they're desperately trying to break free before the opportunity is gone or something. Okay, sure. If they're just supposed to be trapped for hours with nothing else going on, awaiting execution in the morning? Roll once or twice to represent the initial attempts (which may take longer than a single action), then challenge them to alter the circumstances (such as finding said sharp stone). The issue is that you're relying entirely on GM fiat to screw over a player for trying something the rules say they can do very quickly (it's literally just an action, one that's far less tiring than trying to attack with a weapon while keeping your guard up). That makes it ripe fodder for arguments and feelings that the GM is being unfair and arbitrary, or is going out of their way to punish someone. If that's the case, then the entire game relies on GM fiat. I could just as easily say an elder dragon drops down in the middle of the town and attacks. I don't feel it's punishing someone to state that, "No, you can't roll a hundred times in a row and take all night to try to lift those bars. If you can't do it yet, something has to change for you to try again." I've never had this be an issue, I'll admit. Just blindly rolling until you win feels a little like the sort of thing that happens if you try to just view the rules in a vacuum, or take a more wargaming aspect to it, ignoring narrative and logical consequences. Now, don't get me wrong—I don't say this in a judgmental fashion, or casting aspersions on a playstyle. Certainly that's not "wrong" or not fun or anything like that. Just not my preferred style of play.
It does NOT say in the rules that you are allowed to attempt something without in-game consequence. You can try to pickpocket the guard, but you're not guaranteed success there any more than you are here, or unlimited attempts, or freedom from the consequences. This is an easy sort of thing to work out ahead of time with your group. Mine tends to be the type to not reduce things to "rolling endlessly to auto-succeed on a 20" because that's just not fun for us. If there is no pressure on whether or not they succeed, then they can just succeed, or if failure is more interesting, we explore those consequences. If there IS pressure, then they can make some rolls as the tension in the scene mounts and some looming consequence adds to the drama. Disarming a trap: Okay, so the roll part is important, but there's no other pressure? Fine, just sit there and try it, because it's interesting, and makes sense. You screw up badly and you trigger the trap. So keep trying to pick the lock. That's different, though. Context matters. The scene helps determine how. I'm not sure how else to explain it to your liking. I'm okay with there not being an auto-success rule at all, honestly, and an auto-failure one. I'm not a big fan of absolutes in gaming systems, and I prefer other ways to make critical successes/failures a thing. So I'd be okay with this being removed entirely, or making it a house rule—but any play groups would be keenly aware of that at the outset.
It is much, much easier to bend the rule 0 in the players' favor then against. Any PC attempting to do nearly anything that isn't 'jump to the moon" impossible but still well beyond their capabilities is going to expect the game to work consistently, and is going to view any GM fiat of that nature extremely unfavorably. "You can't do this thing the rules say you can do because I said so." Rule 0 doesn't say "You can do or attempt to do anything all the time without any consequences or consideration for what is actually happening," though. As a GM you are under no obligation to let a PC throw a thousand-ton boulder just because they're gonna roll Strength over and over until they get a 20. Struggling against ropes barely requires a minute of actions which isn't even fatiguing, so repeated attempts here result in a weird amount of success for characters with no investment in the skill. Disabling traps is another example, requiring a lot of repeated rolls where nothing happens, waiting for either a critical failure to trigger the trap or a success to finally disable it, and since the DC's are so high to make critical failure a real threat it means 10 results, or 50& of all rolls, result in... Have you ever struggled against ropes or wrestling holds or the like? It is very much fatiguing. And sure, these are fantasy heroes, so not likely to wear out as easily as us mortal folk, but they still can't go on and on forever. It is neither unreasonable, nor even explicitly against the rules to say "Okay, your third attempt has moved to now taking half an hour for each roll, unless you can find a way to change the circumstances" or something like that. This is a case where game rules are not able to simulate narratives or any sense of "in-world physics" or the like, and require a social contract to favor the in-game events over out-of-game unrealistic endless attempts. There's nothing wrong with rolling over and over until you get what you want, but there's nothing wrong with saying that it's not feasible, either. Presumably the PCs have other things they can do, like find that sharp stone hidden in the straw on the cell floor to try to cut their bindings or the like, rather than just saying "Nope, tenth time failed, gonna do it again."
Good stuff, people. This is the sort of thing I want to see, yes. I was hoping that skills and the associated abilities would definitely be able to reach mythic feats of prowess, and they said as much leading up to the playtest. I'm hoping that the game developers deliver on that promise of truly legendary displays of skill, as that was a big selling point for me.
Okay, let's discuss: Dino Fort is officially the best spell ever printed. :D
Sounds cool. Gonna make it a lot of fun to really specialize in a weapon and make it your style. Though as a big fan of Monks, I'm curious what kinds of cool weapon qualities and things they can gain on their unarmed attacks. :P
Which gets back to the arguement they were making. PF1 NPCs/Monsters don't follow the same rules as PCs, hell they don't even follow their own rules. You made up a rule to fix a problem in the system. A problem that comes up nearly every time you try to create something of a set concept and CR. This is very important and bears reiterating a thousand times. Not only did monsters not run on the same exact rules as PCs, they didn't even run on the rules for monsters. There are so many issues with the same as it is that these types of fudges are basically a requirement, which means the system isn't working as intended. Fixing the math and approaching it from a more practical way is going to be a huge boon for this edition.
I really strongly don't like this, because it is pushing a very wide range of entities into a small number of extremely conservative boxes. As opposed to unofficially monsters serving the same exact roles? All 4E did there (and I liked the concept, if not the execution) was codify something that had already existed. It made it easier to design monsters to fulfill certain roles, which they already would try to fulfill anyway. I mean, compared to a wide range of 1HD humanoid creatures who all serve almost the same exact purpose? What does this approach lose, rather than gain by having guidelines for different functions? This wide range of entities you mention almost all fall into the same categories, anyway, only without strong guidelines to help them serve that role.
This is where I'm at. The sheer amount of prep work it takes to design a new monster in 3.x/PF, along with CR being at best a vague guess that is just as often far off the mark, is not worth it. Nor do I need to have every single trait that PCs have for foes that will see a very small amount of screen time. Monsters/NPCs are using level instead of hit dice, which is a big, big plus for me, and should factor into the game's much-improved math nicely. So if it doesn't take me an hour to construct a single monster when it's going to show up and be destroyed in a single encounter, great! Monsters and NPCs aren't PCs, and don't need to run on the exact same rules detail. That you can fully stat out an NPC as you would a PC is a great bonus option, but the number of times I've really needed to do that over the years is very small.
Why do people quote the warped philosophy of a Pixar villain like it's a fact of the universe? No idea. It's a BS idea in the movie (and proven wrong), and it's a BS idea in real life, too. The whole point of the story is that guy has his head so far up it that he can't see the forest for the trees.
As opposed to what, though? How does exact measurements of weight help tell stories? In all my years gaming, they certainly never have. Often, it ends up being something like this: "I picked up <Object>, and now I'm 3 pounds overweight." "Now you suffer encumbrance penalties!" "But it's not even 5 pounds." "Yeah, okay, we'll let this one go." "I'm only seven pounds overweight, though! That's not even ten...." Or it's unnecessary bean-counting kind of management and I don't like doing it. There's never been a case once for me in more than 20 years of gaming, where having that, as opposed to something more loose and narrative and flexible, has aided in any kind of storytelling. Coherent stories don't, in my experience, hinge upon trying to track very strict units of measurement.
I love range bands. I drool over Traveller 5 and all of its range bands, which I shouldn't mention because everyone hates it (except me). I'd play it. I've been needing a sci-fi exploration game, so I would at least try it. I introduced range bands to Chronicles of Darkness (formerly World of Darkness), which is nice, though that particular game needs a lot more (and has a lot of behind-the-scenes developer stuff that's really off-topic).
I much prefer it. Less fiddly bookkeeping, less cognitive load as Dudemeister points out, and allows for more flexible, narrative descriptions of things. Much prefer. As I've said before, I'd like it even more if they went full-on range bands instead of precise weapon and ability ranges and such, but hey, this is a start.
Also not fan of the bulk system, would prefer weight.Eh. Weight can get fiddly as hell. I'll wait to see the final system before passing judgment. I much prefer a looser definition like "bulk." Measuring exact weights has never been a particularly fun or even intuitive system for me. Too much bean-counting for too little reward. A more narrative measurement is easier to manage and play around with if need be. Then again, these days, I'm not a fan of precise measurements for range and stuff, and would greatly prefer range bands and the like.
I'd rather not get another thread locked Lady Firebird arguing with you. If you actually want to discuss this with me (rather than fight with me) feel free to PM me. Otherwise I'll Not be continuing this conversation. It's not an "argument." Please don't insult huge amounts of players for not playing the way you do. It's not that hard. I flagged the post, and if I see any further ones along those lines, I will continue to do so.
Some of it may be in the fact that more powerful mages simply summon more flames and are more accurate. So far, I like what I see and it seems very promising. I do still worry about caster supremacy with spells, but I really love the way they're doing magic. I look forward to seeing more. What I really want to see are feats. Have you ever played FantasyCraft? That game was a good example of how to take the 3.x engine and do some unique stuff with it. In particular, every class, including martial classes, got awesome stuff to do, and the feat chains were shorter, with less speedbumps, and very powerful. Style feats, measuring (of course) fighting styles, were especially awesome.
Excuse me? "Substandard players?" Because they choose to use a few tools to simplify the gameplay experience? Accusing players of not understanding the game because they don't want to scribble everything out on pen and paper? This is extremely insulting, especially the "substandard" remark, and objectively false. I prefer to, say, write out my M&M hero sheets and powers in my own format, and do it all myself, but plenty of players who use Hero Lab understand what they're doing just as much as I do. Your own understanding of the rules of high-level 3.x/PF play is demonstrably lacking, based on what you've erroneously claimed, but putting down whole swathes of players because they play differently than you do? That's exactly the kind of toxic behavior this hobby (like the rest of gaming) absolutely does not need, thank you.
Yeah, it's all very encouraging. It seems like they've really learned from the mistakes of 3.x/PF1 and are striving to simplify in all the right ways (without "dumbing down"). Very promising!
Neither of those things are remotely less "gamey," and "Spell Points" fits right along with "Hit Points" in that regard. I see absolutely no issue here, but further, I don't find the logic behind the desire to stand up to scrutiny. Any number of terms that are baked into the game, from HP to Saves, are as "gamey" as anything else. "Spell Power" is used in many video games as a term to describe magic attack, for instance.
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