MR. H's page

ottdmk wrote:

Player Core 2 pg 170 wrote:

Item Delivery:

If your familiar is adjacent to you, you can Command it to deliver an item. Instead of its normal 2 actions, your familiar Interacts to take an item you’re holding of light Bulk or less, then takes one move action, then finally Interacts to pass off the item to another willing creature. It can instead administer the item to the creature if it can do so with 1 action and has an appropriate type of item (such as alchemical elixir). If your familiar doesn’t reach the target this turn, it holds the item until commanded otherwise. Your familiar must have the manual dexterity ability to select this.

I'm not seeing a lot of problems here. You have to be holding the item for the Familiar to take it. The Familiar must take a Move Action. The only form of activation is to administer the Item to another willing creature. This is a really, really specific Activity. Finally, as it specifies "you can Command" and "instead of its normal 2 actions", no interaction with Independent.

I think the problem is the specificity.

It's close to useless and it also doesn't make any sense that a Familiar could do all of that off of one command but not be able to sit on your shoulder,draw and feed you an elixir.

I just want to point out that there is little need to do this.

Due to advance alchemy's far reduced pool, the intent appears to be giving your party those items while the alchemist primarily uses quick alchemy.

The only advance alchemy items an alchemist would want to keep are alchemical tools and buff elixirs that last more than 10 minutes.

The sprawling history of contradictory familiar errata is just less relevant.

Level 9 double brew let's you use Quick Alchemy to make an item and a one-turn versatile vial.

You then still have two actions to use both. That makes versatile vial uses a third action option after level 9 on any turn where you are using your main class feature.

I doubt I'll feel much need to use a familiar. You already have several action economy buffs baked into the core class.

These updates systematically addressed all the issues I had when playing an alchemist.

Thanks for the link to that youtube video outlining all the changes!

Master weapon proficiency and free-action alchemical-item drawing may be enough for me to want to play the class again.

If I could:

Move up
Heal ally
Attack once

As a turn, then that makes what the alchemist is doing more appealing. Because the current turn of

Move up
Draw elixir
Heal ally a little bit

Is just not a great turn.

I personally found the alchemist miserable to play. I tried leaning into the versatility and "having a tool" for every situation and it just fell flat. GM let me respec to arcane sorcerer and that's going much better.

I think you can play/make something workable and I know how I would approach it now if I was forced to play one again, but I wouldn't choose to play one. Alchemy is neat enough that I would throw some dedication feats to it.

My issues were poor accuracy, difficult resource limited lower levels and little to look forward to at higher levels. I wasn't particularly good with using my alchemical items. The malus on most of my buffs meant my allies did not like being buffed by me even though they went along with it and the action economy to do things in combat is brutal. I did better with a full formula book and spamming quick alchemy, but I had nothing for the boss that adventure and my contributions were only mediocre instead of terrible when I was "doing good".

Resources scaling with level and all being max power appears to be a difficult balance point. Quick alchemy seems to also be a difficult balance point. I don't have a great solution for the alchemist, but I don't like it.

I was thinking to give it a try until...

Man... read the magic weapon enchament rules... YOU NEED a +1 weapon to even remain competitive... i couldnt believe when i first read... +4 weapons rolling 4 extra damage dice!!!

So, youre Str20 level 12 fighter, champion of your local arena... your damage is 1d10+5 (3d10+5 with power attack)... you come across a level 4 fighter wielding a +4 weapon... it does 5d10 BASE DAMAGE!

Huhauauaha... i cant imagine the reaction when the people that wanted to "abolish the mandatory six" read of it... its 4ed armor... but worse.

If it was +4d10 on a crit, i would be perfectly ok... showing how the weapon can deliever really fatal blows... but on ALL ATTACKS... man, this is beyond bad design to me :/

And here I am liking that special abilities and boring numbers are on different slots, allowing us to actually get interesting abilities on stuff before maxing out the boring numbers.

And in this edition, your fighter can easily craft the items himself with little investment.

This is not bad because it chanced from 1E. It's bad because it has nothing in commun with 1E except for names. This will never be a game I'll recognize as Pathfinder.

1. Classes

Nah man, it's basically just Pathfinder, just built a little differently. Maybe if someone only ever plays D&D and D&D-likes, this game seems "too different".

MR. H wrote:

0_0

2e does not look simple at all, even when compared to 1e.

Having a decent layout and tightening the math so that making a trash character is harder is not the same thing as making a system simple.

OK I can agree the current layout is unpleasant on the eyes, at the least, and needs to be reworked but as for it not being simple that might be true at the moment, but the stated goal of the system was to a be a simpler more beginner friendly game andwith some minor changes it will be at the level of 5E or there abouts.

Beginner friendly just means that a random collection of options would still be viable.

What isn't beginner friendly is if two people of the same class run into a situation where one can destroy a basic creature that the other one can't even touch because they didn't know the hidden rules of viable mathematical character building.

For example, a 1e fighter that didn't know about gloves of dueling and all the armor and weapon mastery options was basically playing an NPC class in comparison.

Renchard wrote:

Compared to other rulebooks I've been looking at, like WFPR4e and Savage Worlds, it looks pretty darn similar.

Yes it's similar in that it's on the D20 chassis, other than that it has more in common with 4E or 5E than it does with Pathfinder or 3.X, it like those systems treats customisation and variation like vile expletives.

Mbertorch wrote:

Having played 5E a lot lately, and Pathfinder longer ago, I see a lot of PF1 in PF2. BUT, since you're approaching it from a different angle, I can see why it may look different to you. Which is okay. I hope it is able to thwart your current feelings, though!

Unfortunately this seems unlikely as one of the primary traits they've promoting is the simplification of the system, and seeing as about 50% of the audience seem happy with that Paizo will probably go with that over the people like me who would see the majority of the current test document gutted. As those in favour of simplification mean less changes to the current iteration and a better chance at the coveted 'mass market appeal' despite the simple mass-market field being solidly in WotC's grasp.

0_0

2e does not look simple at all, even when compared to 1e.

Having a decent layout and tightening the math so that making a trash character is harder is not the same thing as making a system simple.

MR. H wrote:

With the feat to use your own stats instead of the forms, your Icewolf could actually be viable at higher levels.

I was looking for that. What is it called? I can't find it.

Sorry, page 388 Druid's vestments

It's a magic item not a feat (Yay?). 1000g, item level 10.

I'm pretty disappointed that druids can no longer hang around in animal form all day. Even a wild druid would be pushing it to get more than 15 minutes. It seems every system is against me playing the druid character whose name I tend to use online the way I envision him. Sigh.

Man they really buried this ability cause I missed it too until I went crt-F through the document.

At level 10, you can take control form, which lets you spend a spell and a wild shape use to turn into a form for an hour (of one spell level lower than max)

With the feat to use your own stats instead of the forms, your Icewolf could actually be viable at higher levels.

So you are looking at 2+Str mod hours at level 10 (and eating that many spells to do it). Not exactly All day (sadly), but better than minutes

Mbertorch wrote:

Disagree. Feels like a beta(playtest) to me, but yeah, obviously. Can't wait to try it tonight. GMing it for my 5E group. They're pumped too. Probably my new system, just going off a cursory read-through.

Yes and I'm sure it will do great with a 5E group, for people who wanted something that even vaguely resembled Pathfinder as we know it you have to admit there isn't much similar to the 1e incarnation

My group primarily plays Savage Worlds and we are having our first 4e campaign in the works.

From my perspective, 2e is basically pathfinder and I would still place it in the 3.X vein of RPGs. (though probably 3.9 by now)

Y u no play 5E?

I don't like it.

And I don't like it because I feel like the GM (or myself as the GM) has to write large chunk of rules AND the game is poorly balanced.

Like man, I can swallow simplicity and gutting mechanics if it works well and 5e has never worked well in our groups.

Every preview increased my sense of dread. By the time the playtest dropped, I had nearly zero energy to look through it aside from getting a few more things to make jokes about to my friends.

After glancing through some things, not too bad. Skills do things now, magic arms and armor have been reworked so interesting abilities are a thing you actually get now before maxing out the boring number bonuses. Druid wild shape can't be used as utility until level 10 (which is way better than never). It appears that Racial, skill, and general feats help more out of combat while your class gives most of what you are doing in combat.

Magic is still really strong (Full caster > Everything else), you can't actually fix that and be in genre. More-so, the cool magic is Pathfinder/D&D's appeal to me over other games I like. Being a martial seems to suck less now, and they were pretty tolerable in 1e (compared to 3.5). Sure things got "nerfed", but a lot of things got "nerfed" to compensate that your skills actually do things now.

Summons and Magic Item crafting look fine (yeah Item level being a thing is "meta" but it's a contrivance I can get behind to contain the math).

And yes, I am getting a 4e vibe, but 4e did have a good layout (and complicated games need to deliver information efficiently). The big difference from the 4e set up is that abilities are cumulative, where in 4e you replace powers as you level (oh and have about a 3rd of the feats).

So yeah, seems fine. I'm still not SUPER jazzed about it, but it's not like I would refuse to play it (like I refuse to play 5e).

MR. H wrote:

Yeeeaaah, the bigger problem is prepping content for our homebrew campaigns.

PCs do so much with very complicated and entirely separate rules and it's just very difficult as a GM to know what to expect without mastering the game. That's the big problem for most of my friends.

I'm a rules guy though. So that isn't my problem. My problem comes from the sheer clunk and my absolute demand for NPC/PC parity (I'm not even OK with Starfinder given how the math of AC and to-hit inverts from PC to NPC). 1e has parity but it also has clunk. No amount of engine or automation is going to fix the "I need to know what these 20 spells and feats do at the same time". I can do it, but it drains me to be spending so much effort on it.

Sure 2e is putting everything into feats and spells and the lack of other categories is going to prevent lots of general rules arguments on forums. But everyone still does dozens of things and things they do are less memorable. Way too many of these abilities are full of numbers I'm going to have to look up every time to even know if I want to use it.

I'm all for tons of abilities and deep mechanics, but the mechanics need to justify their weight enough so that I'm interested enough in them to easily want to memorize the rules. This is far more important to me than "balance".

I'm not completely sure I understand where you are coming from on this, but if it is about it being hard to DM monsters and NPCs with all kinds of abilities, than the good news is that is being cut waaaay down. Stat blocks will be much simpler to use.

But if monsters aren't following the same rules as PCs, then I don't care. I can't really stand 5e monsters and blog about subjective skill DCs for 2e probably means I'll never want to run it. I hate seeing the majority of what creatures can do be hidden in the "creatures can do what I feel they can" sub system.

Also you can have plenty of abilities, but they need to each mean something and be meaningfully different from one another.

Yeeeaaah, the bigger problem is prepping content for our homebrew campaigns.

PCs do so much with very complicated and entirely separate rules and it's just very difficult as a GM to know what to expect without mastering the game. That's the big problem for most of my friends.

I'm a rules guy though. So that isn't my problem. My problem comes from the sheer clunk and my absolute demand for NPC/PC parity (I'm not even OK with Starfinder given how the math of AC and to-hit inverts from PC to NPC). 1e has parity but it also has clunk. No amount of engine or automation is going to fix the "I need to know what these 20 spells and feats do at the same time". I can do it, but it drains me to be spending so much effort on it.

Sure 2e is putting everything into feats and spells and the lack of other categories is going to prevent lots of general rules arguments on forums. But everyone still does dozens of things and things they do are less memorable. Way too many of these abilities are full of numbers I'm going to have to look up every time to even know if I want to use it.

I'm all for tons of abilities and deep mechanics, but the mechanics need to justify their weight enough so that I'm interested enough in them to easily want to memorize the rules. This is far more important to me than "balance".

I'm sad not because Pathfinder is changing, but because it looks like Pathfinder won't win me back.

Our group likes playing Pathfinder, but no one wants to run it. But the information we are getting about 2e just doesn't gel with any us and some of the stuff I'm seeing only makes the game seem even harder to run while being less fun to play.

We're hoping that all the info only looks bad and that the new system is going to be great. But man do I not have the energy to do a deep dive on this like I did Starfinder. 2e is going to only have a superficial look through to grab my attention, which can be wrong. I didn't buy the book with the Warlock in it because the bolts weren't touch AC, even though they become touch AC eventually. I still never bought that book. I gave it a 30 second look at Gencon and that one class feature decided my purchase.

I'm probably going glance through the skill system of 2e and decide whether or not I care about the system. Then I'll move on to magic item crafting.

Oh I didn't notice the reduced duration on wild shape to cap out at 10 hours.

That's bad. The Druid is still a better wildshaper which is just unacceptable.

Popping in and out of rage every fight doesn't make sense to me.

One thing you can do is label the battle mat rows and columns and have everyone call out where they are moving and from where.

"Ragnar moves from B9 to C7"

They tried to fix the code, but the key difference between 3.5 and Pathfinder is that in the "Ex-paladins" text, 3.5 says you have to grossly violate your code while PF says any violation causes you to fall.

Hmm, rebalancing the number of spell slots I see.

3 spells per level, stronger cantrips, inflated HP.

The recipe for the kind of 5e combats I don't like, without encounter powers from 4e to help prevent at-will spam.

Elixir ideas: Elixir of recovery. If you drink this elixir before 8 hours of sleep, you wake up the next day with all HP healed.

Elixir of cat eye. You gain superior dark vision for 8 hours but are dazzled in bright light.

Elixir of toxicity. You better resist poisons and unarmed or natural attacks against you poison the attacker, but all healing effects roll minimum healing against you.

Elixir of fight. For 8 hours your arms turn into wings and give you a flight speed, but they cannot be used to hold objects.

Counterpoint: It doesn't. Only Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard really need to be in core.

Don't forget Dwarf, Halfling, and Elf!

I like that the playtest rules will be free so that no matter my lack of enthusiasm or interest, I'll give the game a look anyways.

Oh 2e will have plenty of "customization" but the question is if I will care.

There is a big difference between choices, meaningful choices, and interesting choices.

So far, I've not been sold on the hype.

So it does less than a 1e Alchemist?

At least that is the impression given off by the preview. I would have to see more new stuff than I am told core abilities that got delayed/became optional to actually get excited about this class.

You didn't even confirm if it has spell casting or what kind (1/2, full, act). At least by knowing that I could get a round idea at how many tools it has.

A classless sub system would be great. Like a class that got some general feats first and then any other class feat at -4 levels or something. Like an Adventure class, not as strong but more freeformed.

A comprehensive class builder would also be useful in large groups like mine where people don't like repeating classes.

But I think PF should keep classes. Some in my group love classes and complain about the lack of classes on other games.

MR. H wrote:

Sara Marie wrote:

Removed some more posts and replies. When the conversation here on the forums regarding race/ancestry shifts to discussing if its "too PC", "too politically correct" or "caving to identity politics" posts inevitably stray towards discussing how the majority of gamers don't have a problem with the term "race" and therefore it should be kept as is. The implication of this argument, sometimes merely hinted at, sometimes stated outright, is that the majority of gamers are white and if they don't have a problem with it then it shouldn't be a problem. This creates a hostile environment for gamers who are not white. It dismisses them as irrelevant to the community and the conversations about gaming and allowing those conversations to stand on our forums creates an unwelcoming environment; a place on the internet where their feelings are dismissed rather than accepted.

What?

White people have more problems with the term race than any other group.

Also this post can come off as "anyone who has a problem with the term ancestry is racist" or at least that is what is being merely hinted at or outright stated by certain posters.

The purpose of this thread was to thank the developers for addressing the narrative and mechanical issue that "race" as a loaded and misrepresentative term played in the first edition of pathfinder with a system that looks to be much simpler, open and encouraging of more of what makes pathfinder great, the ability to play the broadest range of characters imaginable in fun ways that fit into the impressive world building that the developers have done. Neither race nor species feels mechanically necessary in a high fantasy setting where magic, and not science, is the primary causality of everything that exists.

I don't understand why acknowledging that the idea of a broad and diverse "ancestry" is what makes the humans of Golarion so much more compelling than humans in other fantasy settings and wanting to see that more...

I would clarify. I don't have any problems with the term ancestry. I see no sound logical reason to support or detract the term. In my opinion, arguments about word definitions are fun but pointless. Whatever word they use means whatever it means as a game term. I couldn't care less what term they use here.

One of the most interesting design insights that came during D&D 5E's development was that a given concept or mechanic had to meet a 70% favourable public feedback threshold to make the cut. Just under 70% and they would rework the idea and release another version for playtesting. Significantly less than 70%, and the idea would either get completely scrapped or sent back to the drawing board for a total redesign.

This is perhaps a gross exaggeration, but one could make the claim that 5E was an RPG designed by committee/focus group. Whether or not you like 5E might inform whether or not you think this is a good approach to game design.

Good design is not a democracy.

If you want to discuss how the shift from using "race" to "ancestry" is too politically correct or caving to identity politics you'll need to take it off of paizo.com. We will not be hosting discussion of that on our forums. Those conversations almost immediately stray into debating or arguing in a way that does not promote a welcoming environment on our forums.

I mean this should really show everyone that Paizo doesn't care if this term hurts your feelings.

It's probably safe to assume it wasn't changed for that reason either.

PF2's goblins are the newest incarnation of Drizzt Do'Urdens at the table. You know what I'm talking about here.

It's not so much that goblins-as-core may give license to gray-area players, which is a minor but real consideration. It's that Paizo is ruining the lore and core appeal that made Pathfinder goblins attractive to players in the first place. And just like stupid drow, they did it to tap into some "mass marketing" appeal of them as a playable race.

Seems like a bad idea that Paizo, for some reason, positively adores.

I've always hated Paizo goblins for being memes.

This face lift makes them and Golarion more interesting

Actually the best thing I've seen so far for 2e. The ancestry feats are cool (like making junk versions of objects) and the fluff is fun.

Idc that "it's different". Different that yields neat things is something I can work with.

Panel from Gary Con with Jason Buhlman and Stephen Radney-Macfarland:

"We've looked at ways to ensure that spellcasters still have cool, fun, useful things to do on their turn, right? I think one of our guiding principles; When it's your turn, the spotlight should be on you and you should do something cool. Right, that's kind of the general guideline. But, once your turn is over, the spotlight should not somehow still be on you. And sometimes with spellcasters that could be the case. Their effects could be hindering and messing with so many parts of the combat that it was like - some of the other characters would be like: "Well, I was there too, I guess. But you blew this spell and ...".
And I'm not saying that that can't still happen, because it certainly can, but I think we've now given every character fun ways that they can interact with ... the combat, the story, with the set-up, that you won't feel like: "Wow, I didn't participate in that at all". And I mean, if you just want to cut it down to brass tacks, we certainly made sure that a lot of the damage, you know, swings and flows between different character types, at different moments of play. Right, so, you now, the Rogue is certainly going to find points in time when their damage bursts are high and they're going to do a lot of damage. The Wizard still, obviously, has spells that are gonna deal a lo ... a fair amout of damage to a lot of targets. Erm, that's kind of one of their schticks, right? Whereas the Fighter is just gonna be like: "That guy! I'm gonna go mess that guy up!" Right? And that's their thing and we want them to be good at 'their thing'".
"Not only mess them up, but lock them down"
"Yeah, and lock 'em down and prevent them going and messing with anybody else. Those sort of things are important to how we want the game experience to work. So, you know, when it comes to the kind of difference between martial characters and spell casting characters, there's still going to be some differences, they're going to play in different ways,...

It's a trivial thing to prevent casters from stomping all over the niches of others, it's an entirely different matter to preserve fun casters and make the noncasters relevant.

I don't like the focus on damage and DPS in their response. That's basic stuff. Damage is boring. Damage is banal. It's what everyone can do. It had nothing to do with C/M. Damage has never been the problem. A wizard doing more melee damage than a fighter is a result of the problem not the problem itself.

I feel like the new Rogue must be in a decent place if the choice of use of the term "Thievery" is the biggest cause of debate right now on this thread...

:)

The entirety of the presented rogue's usefulness depends on the skill system that we really don't know about yet.

Will having tons of proficiencies and skill feats matter? We don't know.

The rest of the kit presented seems based around damage which isn't all that important for what a rogue needs to do to feel like a rogue.

1) Please don't joke about killing yourself.

2nd this.

I don't particularly like "5e dying but more complicated" death system either, but I'm not too hung up about it.

I just don't get the wait. We could all have alpha rules now while the real playtest is still getting changed.

Paizo could have thousands of people pouring over their current rules and pointing out unexpected combos or expressing confusion about wording.

Right now it feels like I'm being marketed too not that I'm being invited for feedback and it doesn't make me feel good about 2e.

The central problem with the rogue in the 3.x design space has always been the weakness of skills.

It seems to me that the rogue is leaning heavily on the new skill system to be interesting and do cool things because most of the class stuff previewed just isn't interesting.

People are talking about 5e like system mastery can't make you tons better than everyone else at the table. Or that it can't be powergamed.

That is my biggest problem with 5e, for all is it's simplification, restriction of Character concepts and narrative pacing, it's still very easy to break the game. I personally find 5e to be far more fragile than PF ever was.

I hope Paizo finally bans Power Attack, because every time my Wizard takes it I end up hitting with my dagger so rarely that it barely counts.

This is an example of why there will always be traps options in a diverse system.

I would rather there be "trap" options than to limit concepts.

Anyone else notice that shifting your grip seemed to be an action?

If having magic is as cool as not having magic, then why would anyone bother learning magic?

MMO's had to address this and they did it with roles and niche protection.

But what about TTRPGs? Do they go the MMO route with niches and limited utility magic? Or do they find some other way to keep mundanes relevant. Do we add narrative risk to magic. In Hellfrost every spell has a chance to permanently reduce your magical power, so people don't spam magic, even out of combat. With the way the system is set up, players never really run the risk of losing magic power forever unless they are spamming magic and run out of re-roll tokens.

gustavo iglesias wrote:

The fighter do not have the option to, say, lead armies, forge empires, or become a legend.

so role playing is not an option, I see. I'd argue that a good Leadership score might give you an army to lead, that the Kingdom building rules will help you forge empires and that you might become a legend if you actually do something legendary so, the options are there if you are looking for them

But it doesn't do anything. Those armies are not all that useful and a kingdom would give you posterity at best, furthermore these things are not even fighter exclusive options. A caster would generally make for a better King than a fighter.

Martials can be carefully built to be adequate at higher levels (more useful than binding an outsider to pay them in a share of the treasure), but it is very difficult.

MR. H wrote:

4e has rules.

5e has difficulty DCs. It does not tell you what DC climbing a tree is. It is up to the DM to determine if the tree is of "medium" difficulty to climb.

5e gives no context to this difficulty. "Medium" for the person attempting? Medium for their level? Or just "Medium" in a game/world sense. Regardless, difficulty is not defined in physical in-universe or even in-game terms. It is purely a DM gut check. Your DM's feelings comprises the entirety of Skill DCs outside of opposed rolls.

So I don't understand comparing the 5e skill system to anything. It's function depends entirely on the DM.

I'll be honest, I think that's a distinction without a difference. If I, as the GM, want a tree to be harder to climb, I will describe it in a way that indicates it's harder to climb (It's a baobab not an oak, it's rotten in places, it's haunted, etc.) What determines the difficulty of climbing the tree is still "how hard I feel it should be to climb" which will always be the case because the tree does not exist until the GM puts it there and the players don't know anything about the tree save for what the GM tells them.

I mean, it would be weirder if all oak trees were exactly as hard to climb as all other oak trees. I mean, if someone asks "how hard would it be to climb that tree" I guarantee my initial response would be "not very" or "a little tough" or something else qualitative not "the DC is x".

When I GM, things just are. My setting of difficulty happens before the session.

So if the players want to interact with an object that I didn't plan around, I prefer the rules providing a DC not my gut.

I prefer when the players surprise me. If I'm always making up DCs on the fly, I'm always controlling the players, which bores me.

So I don't place "medium trees", I place a tree and the DC can be determined by the descriptions in the climb skill table.

The math is bugging me. An extra d12 averages 6.5 while power attack gave an extra 18 damage by the end.

All concerns about accuracy are moot, you game the system to work around the accuracy penalties.

Lucas Yew wrote:

As long as it does not have floating, treadmill DCs, which make the campaign world UNSTABLE and LACK VERISIMILITUDE, it will be fine. Both 4E and 5E (to a certain extent) suffer from this, making in-game stats have unstable values in interacting with the world.

I am not a 5e expert, but I am pretty sure it does not have that problem. I am something of 1 4e expert, and it definitely doesn't.

An oak tree is still an oak tree in 4e too.

_
glass.

4e has rules.

5e has difficulty DCs. It does not tell you what DC climbing a tree is. It is up to the DM to determine if the tree is of "medium" difficulty to climb.

5e gives no context to this difficulty. "Medium" for the person attempting? Medium for their level? Or just "Medium" in a game/world sense. Regardless, difficulty is not defined in physical in-universe or even in-game terms. It is purely a DM gut check. Your DM's feelings comprises the entirety of Skill DCs outside of opposed rolls.

So I don't understand comparing the 5e skill system to anything. It's function depends entirely on the DM.

What if you only roll for skills when you are in a contest with another creature?

What if your "rank" of untrained, trained, expert, master, and legendary decided things that you can do and only moderately helped out with a skill contest?

3.X have us this idea that everything you can do with a skill should be decided by a roll or taking 10. But with the d20 as the base randomizer this can lead to unwieldy systems, tons of mods, and just wonky stuff overall. For example opening lock DCs have to assume everyone can take 20. You need at least a DC of 21 or higher to prevent anyone from being able to pick a lock.

Now let's say expert thievery let's you pick expert locks, but picking pockets is still an opposed roll. How do people feel about a system like that?

Our group is going to start a 4e campaign for the first time soon. The system looks neat. No one want to run a PF 1e campaign and a lot of us don't like playing 5e.

The minimum I want out of 2nd ed. is that the APs are easy to convert back into 1st, at least easier than Starfinder, where converting is a big pain as it is. I might enjoy the new setting specific books, after all it is still Golarion, but I really hope I can enjoy playing the Adventures you will writer after August 2019 too.

Don't just screw us over, who came in the 3.5 diaspora to you. Let us keep the system we chose 18 years or so ago and make it easy for us to still enjoy your wonderfully crafted APs even though we won't follow you to your new, sexy streamlined rules.

That's my only wish for 2nd ed. Don't make converting it back too hard

The minimum you want out of 2nd ed is the ability to not use it?

You aren't the target market. Paizo only has incentive to make converting PF 1e material to 2e easy and balanced to flesh out the content of 2e.

Understand your request is equivalent to asking Paizo to keep supporting 1e not a request about 2e. You are only phrasing the request to include the words "2e" but in truth you don't want anything from 2e, you want more 1e.

You'll probably just have to wait for another publisher to make another 3.5/Pathfinder fork. Or buy 3rd party content made for 1e.

MR. H wrote:

If most of what skills are comes from ranks rather than the number added to the d20 (aka needing to be trained or super trained to even attempt certain things) then why bother adding level to the roll at all?

Because plenty of basic stuff has static DCs, and adventurers should get better at doing that basic stuff.

Climbing a tree might be a mildly difficult thing for an untrained lvl 1 wizard, but it's not for a high level one.

The buy-in with HP is that a wizard gets better at taking a punch, but why would murdering goblins intrinsically make him a better climber?

Like it or not, this system naturally makes the game narrower in scope and reduces customization. Oh sure, you can add more decisions than 1e, but if I can't make level 20 Fighter than is worse at lying compared to a level 1 Bard, then the game no longer covers something I could have done in 1e.

And No, "RPing" not being able to do certain things doesn't count. That's a player version of rule 0 used to patch a game or use a game for something beyond it's intention.