Lisrath's page

In my humble opinion the discussion about alignment is very unclear about what is the actual point.
Alignment is the only true choice about the personality of your character. Nothing else on the character cheat gives a hint on how your character sees the world.
The mechanical impact in the game is very little. So what do you want to create? A character with a story, a development and its own looks at the world or do you design a character as a mechanical function? If you play a shining knight then this character would refuse to burn down a village just to get a fancy ring or because he don´t like the major. So characters always hinder specific actions, because they have a view on the world and they are not just puppets you use as a avatar for every idea you might have.
This is important for the gamemaster because she/he an use this information to drag you in the story and keep your character engaged.
One problem seems to be that players and gamemasters do not understand alignment. Even if you are good you can act evil because you are still no angel, you are just mostly good. Being neutral means to actively keep the good and evil on balance and not "I don´t care".
A second problem is that a lot of players don´t care and don´t want to care they want to do what ever seem to be fun in this specific moment: "It´s a game!" But this a a puestion that has to be answered by the group: What game do we want? Serious characters or something else? Once you answered this question the discussion about your character would do that or not should be over.
But I think that this issue should be addressed in the rule book and clarified.

This Problem comes to me when I was trying to create a rogue character: Skills that are against Monster DCs are very hard. This is a matter of all Proficencies so I took it to the genarel discusion.
One Example to start with: Deception is Charisma based and I was thinking about how much Cha I want to have for my elven rouge. Bevore that I had looked at several monsters to understand the ruleset better.
This is what I got: Perception of a 2 lvl monster +7, a 4 lvl Monster +10, 8 lv +18, 18 lvl +28.
Some Math: (character lvl) 2 + (Attribute) 4 + (Proficency) 1 = +7 vs. (2 lvl monster) DC 17 => 50% with maximum stats
18 + 5 + 3 = +26 vs (18 lcl monster) DC 38 => 40% without feat or magic boosts (There are not many such boosts)
For the rogish character this means even with max Charisma she will be weak in the impersonate action or every other decepion action against an opponent of the same lvl.
Curious by this I checked other Skills and the result is that most skills, attackrolls and savingthrows has to be on your best attribute to get an 50% chance with lower Attributes this falls of quickly.
If you are no Dex-character you are very bad at hiding even if you get legendary and deception is mostly usefull for Charismna based Charakters. On the other hand afer a few lvl everyone can use Medicine to stabilise a charakter (fix DC 15)
Fighters are the best martialists and hardly get a 65% to hit most other characters have a 15% or higher critical failure chance, even raising on 2nd Stikes.
These checks that are against enemys seems to be a lot harder than other DCs and if you not concentrate all your resources in them you will be weak even if you concentrate recources these skills seem to be very unrelaiabel. With this character I do not want to sneak in a buildiung because I wont trust her ability to stay hiden even with all my resources put in there.
Durting character creation this kept in my mind and it feels wierd to allocate Skill increases, even by having so much of them I knew that I wont use many of them because the risk of failing is just to high and often to dangerous.
To put it in a nutshell I fell the Attribute bonuses are way to important to the usage of action against enemy DCs and these Skils are very unreliabel what makes them less interesting (35% feint action) or very dangerous (geting caught while scouting alone). The only part where I like this is in savingthrows you have to roll nearly always against the best DC of the caster with your most of the time subotional save. This makes magic users stronger and more reliabel.

I want to add that I feel very undicided by what I see in PF PLaytest overall. There are great advantages but I have the feeling that a lot of them are unused and this is a good thing for a beta test, but on the other hand I see so many holes that I am not sure if this playtest will be enough to fix it. But good luck and best wiches.

Ok, I have waited for this. First, I want to say that I am pretty hyped and nearly everything I heard sound awesome to me, all but this point.

It seems to be, that skills will progress with the characters proficiency bonus and not with ranks to be allocated freely. Now I want to point out 3 different concerns about streamlined skills. Examples will make this post word heavy, sorry.

Paizo told us, that building a character we as players want to build is one of their most important issues, but this skill advancement takes away most of the noncombat choices.

1.: Building a character is fine but what about character development? What is happening to the personality during adventuring? And what does that mean for the characters skills?
Maybe I play a redneck farm boy with some dragon blood mixed in. At the beginning he leaves behind the exhausting farm labor dreaming of exiting adventures, long leggy girls and extensive wealth. But beside some awakening arcane powers he only knows a littlebit about nature and cattle.
After some experience he grows stronger and starts to exalt himself above all those weak town folks. Pushing around the people which seems to need his strength because of their own debility. He learns to intimidate and how to appraise and he gets what he has dreamed of.
Some time later, maybe after the death of one of his mates, he must except the danger he puts himself into. He starts to doubt his own power and grows some more adult. He focusses on unlocking the mysterious power within and learns all he can about the arcane arts…
In first edition this could be done, please tell me that second edition will no forget about the greatness of roleplay outside of combat.

2.: Streamlined skill means there are some skills you are exceptionally good at and some you are absolutely not able to perform. What is with the in-between?
Also the amount of skills has to be reduced. Otherwise there would be to much things a character is not capable of. This seems to be the case with athletics for climbing, swimming and grappling I assume there will be more.
I will now compare to the only one thing about DnD 5e I like “advantage”. They reduced the amount of skill numbers but by getting advantage or disadvantage on a check due to the story you invented for your character the 18 scores on your sheet expand to 54 different talents depending on the task your character faces. If your character is raised in a rocky desert, he is unlike to swim very well even he can be quite good climbing.
There can be diversity even in same classes and back rounds. Attributes and class do not tell everything about my characters.

3.: Like in most RPGs combat is the only encounter the rulebooks seems to know. So many pages of detailed rules and information on how to fight and so less attention to all the interesting stuff happening beside.
The encounter mode was presented as fight mode. You can have downtime, exploration and fight. Will the great rules for chases find their way in the core rules? When I’m DMing I feel a little bit left alone with encounters like a sinking vessel, an angry mob which thinks the adventures are guilty of some evil act (because the real bad guy tricked them) or other stuff.
I totally understand that there can’t be rules for every possible noncombat encounter but please stop the “encounter = sword wielding”-mindset and help DMs building cool and challenging encounter.

And therefor skills are important and not something which is added to a character only because he has to argue with some noble from time to time. They need cool rules.

Please imagine, your group got captured by some evil overlord and he puts them in his personal prison to torture them later that sunny day. Your spellcaster are tied with some anti-magic filament which can’t be torn by pure force and no one has his equipment. The guy who does his duty in this rotting vault is looking like some Quasimodo but without the friendly attitude. What will you do?
Maybe the loving cleric of Shelyn tries to find some beauty beneath his ugliness. Inside/investigation-what-ever-you-call-it-check? She learns that he probably suffered all his live under the disgust of others and this was the only employment he got.
She sees a way to talk her way out, but it surely won’t be easy. To get some advantage the beautiful priestess wants him to get her some water and cloth to clean herself. Easy diplomacy check. She wins, and he brings some water and rags.
Now she starts washing herself in a position where he definitely will beware of her and she is sure he never had seen such a beauty before. Maybe a perform or a bluff check in order to get a good bonus to the unavoidable Diplomacy check.
She fells now ready and tries to charm (unmagically) him by taking about the beauty he can earn if he uncovers his splendid soul, releasing his inner light and following her on the path of love. Very hard diplomacy check. If she makes it, fine escape the castle and you got a buddy. She failed? The guard gets angry and starts to heat some iron bar in the ember mumbling something about ending her beauty.
(In Call of Cthulhu there is a nice rule on forcing a check, means to retry but if you fail the second time, something really worse will happen. This is a cool way to put players in an interesting spot “Do you really take the risk? -evil grin-“ If she makes it the guard suddenly starts to cry and help you out. If not…)
The hideous man calls for two colleges and turn towards the cell. When they enter the rouge recognizes that two of them have a key and one has a small knife. The fight is on. Without your gear this might be pretty one sided but if you win: you claimed your freedom. If you lose the cleric of Shelyn ended up this a huge stigma on her former beautiful face, one fellow is knocked out but maybe the rogue managed to steal a key or the small knife? The guard are satisfied by their easy victory and not intelligent enough to notice. Now can cut the anti-magic filament and free your wizard. Carve a model of a key he can use as material component to cast knock. Or you got a key and wait until the guard sleeps…
What will happen later? Will the cleric of Shelyn remove the scar as soon as possible? Will she try to improve her diplomacy skills to convince more? Will some dark anger raises within her?

One thing I learned in my games is that creating a character is living part of the game. At first you may not even have an idea of what this character will be turn out to be. I have a female tiefling wizard with points in perform / walk in (in German this is a pun Auftreten / Eintreten) and the reason is that is what she was doing in the game not the brawler goes first, no she does, yelling at the enemy try to intimidate them. After she opened an uptight door by rolling natural 20 strength check (strength 10), I really believe that it is impressive seeing her walking in!

To put it in a nutshell, I think that skills are often overlooked, that noncombat encounters should be more present in the rules and personalities need more than skills tied to their job or origins. I dislike the idea of having no control over the noncombat advancement of my character and as a DM I dislike social encounters solved by a single roll.
I know there are different approaches to the game, min-maxed power-characters, high-rollplaying-don’t-giving-a-s***-on-efficiency, beginners, simple-rules-lovers and more. All these are fine and have their place but please don’t forget one off them by trying to keep it simple.

Kind regards