Maddigan's page

I don't have any guides, but Paizo taking this hardline stance is going to hurt them. AI is going to happen whether Paizo wants it or not. There is no stopping it. Trying to police every instance of AI use by a large, varied gaming community is going to create a real adversarial relationship with some of the most loyal members of Paizo's fan base that spend the time to write guides to improve investment in the game for themselves and others. AI makes the guides easier to write for people that aren't making money writing them, but also operate as free, no labor to Paizo helpful tools for the community.

Now Paizo plans to ban or deny these loyal customers in a futile effort to slow down AI? That doesn't seem like a great idea.

At some point in time, AI is going to be creating DMs and likely be able to take Paizo modules and convert them so an AI DM can run them or support a DM running them for players. It's best Paizo look for ways to embrace this tech than try to work against something that is going to keep getting better and better and better.

Paizo not allowing or using AI tools is like trying stop video games or the internet from being used. It's a mistake and not likely to work out well for the company in the long run.

I hope Paizo rethinks this stance as you can't slow down new technology adoption. It will lead to obsolescence and give competitors an advantage that will lead to self-inflicted damage that could be avoided.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Claxon wrote:

I don't think concentrate replaces verbal components.

Auditory specifically mentions needing to be able to speak, while concentrate talks about only mental focus.

But really it doesn't matter to the overall discussion.

*Although there is a problem with the auditory trait that it doesn't sufficiently differentiate between needing to be able to speak, needing the target to hear something, and something that generates sound waves that have an impact regardless of ability to be heard.

Examples, sounds waves causing damage. A spell that exerts control on someone (command), and casting a spell (speaking).

Verbal components used to have the concentrate trait. So when they took all the verbal components off spells, they replaced them with the concentrate trait.

Auditory trait generally means you need to be able to make sound. I can see how you thought that was the replacement for verbal, but very few spells have the auditory trait.

Almost every spell (maybe every one) that used to have a verbal component now has the concentrate trait as a replacement.

I still disagree with your conclusion, but it mostly doesn't matter on how the game is run or played (because the remastered spells are relatively clear with their new traits) so I'm just going to drop it.

I didn't make a conclusion. I'm stating what they did. They replaced the verbal components with the concentrate trait. I'm assuming they did it because the verbal trait had the concentrate trait. They wanted to keep the concentrate trait on all the spells that had the verbal component beforehand to keep the general idea that spells have a concentrate and manipulate component to their casting to maintain internal consistency with abilities that work off the concentrate or manipulate trait. It was one of the first things I noticed when I was looking at how they changed the verbal and somatic components on spells in the remaster.

Other changes:

1. No more school tags.

2. Spell name changes from magic missile to force barrage. Plenty like that.

3. Removal of alignment tags or damage, all replaced with spirt damage and the holy or unholy trait.

4. Positive energy became vitality. Negative became void.

The addition of the concentrate tag in place of a verbal component was like the above changes. They had to replace it with something, so they took the trait that interacted with verbal tag pre-remaster and applied it to all the spells.

I think you can color the concentrate trait with whatever explanation exists now for how a class cast spells. Might be verbal for a bard or maybe an intense concentration for a wizard or sorc or a prayer for a cleric. I imagine that color element is open-ended.

I have no idea. Seems like an arbitrary limitation that I can't find a reason for.

If I feel like the player would like one, I give it to them as treasure or enough material if they want to make it themselves. Material prices are too expensive in my opinion for what they provide, especially with the rules for material that you can put runes on by power level.

Agreed that is the biggest problem. The new Oracle suffers from the same problem as the Pyschic - you can poach the best part. I for one prefer a sorcerer - oracle over a straight oracle.

I don't know. I like the oracle. They gave the oracle the old sorcerer get one spell from any list thing and Divine Access. They have a lot of spell power. My oracle picked up synesthesia and some good blasting spells.

I do wish the curses did more interesting things though. They're kind of boring now, but powerful.

If they do a ramp class design, it has to be fast enough and controlled enough by the player where the DM doesn't have to do a lot of work to make it work. Player control over their abilities is very important. The only way the ramp works is if it can be done by the player within the duration of the battle consistently to be a viable play-style.

*Face slamming intensifies*

Okay. So, my question has been answered.
Spell and Class DC are not the same.
Thank you everyone.

Mods, can you lock this thread? We don't need this argument here.

Welcome to the forums.

Are there really that many players of wood kineticists bullying their GM into letting them plant forests?

Not that I wouldn't be amused that there were enough players bullying their GMs into letting them plant forests that it required discussion of how to handle it. It would be even funnier if it required Paizo to issue errata because of players "bullying GMS into letting them plant forests."

That's just funny.

I just like the idea of the build up to climactic ability then reset.

it feels as epic as the oracles curse concept to me.

I don't want this. It's one of those ideas that seems theoretically interesting, but the way PF2 combat works it would rarely occur because fights rarely last that long. Single targets last even less long. So any "ramp" would have to be very, very fast to have a chance of even doing it once against a prominent target.

I do not like ramp up abilities. Too much movement, too many other PCs doing their stuff, and targets often don't last long with the crit rules whether a spell crit or melee crit from multiple party members launching attacks.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

This argument comes down to the value of RK. I think the reason sorcerers have sorcererous potency is because they are bad at RK checks. The game expects wizards to more consistently be hitting the weakest save and sorcerers to be guessing most of the time.

If this is not the result playing out in game its not the wizards design at fault.

Not really. Intelligence used to give a huge skill advantage in PF1.

Skills are easy to come by at a trained level in PF2. So the focus is on proficiency. Intelligence gives no advantage in proficiency.

At best you can do like some do spending skill feats on additional lore which auto-scales and uses intelligence to give a minor advantage on often unnecessary RK checks that cost an action that use intelligence.

You know how often I used RK in PF1? All the time, nearly every battle. It was a free action, intelligence based, and wizards were the undisputed kings of knowledge skills.

You know how often I use RK in PF2? Almost never. Religion and Nature for some RK skills are wisdom based. Proficiency matters big in this edition. Lore skills are narrow so additional lore might not cover everything. And the more importantly nothing is immune to almost anything anymore, even the immune creatures are obvious like a red dragon immune to fire or devils. So you don't even need to RK any more to figure out how to beat creatures. And it costs 1 action to maybe gain a minor unnecessary advantage while martials just hit it to determine what works against it and 99% of the time hitting it works.

The games expectation as far as I can tell is that if you do not RK you should be hitting higher saves 2/3s of the time on spells you cast.

If sorcerers are hitting a higher save 2/3s of the time because they guessing which spell will hit low save instead of knowing which spell will hit lowest save then it would explain why sorcererous potency is on sorcerer and after the remaster locked away from other classes...

That's not how it works any more. I don't know why some are having a hard time adapting to the changes.

Spell power is no longer determined by just the save. In fact, save is not the even best determinant of spell power:

1. Spell effect as determined by the four saves is the most important way to look at a spell. What happens at each save level. A lower save may not be best if on a success there is no effect against a spell that even if you succeed you take half-damage or some other effect.

2. Power of the spell itself including tags, amount of damage, riders, incap, and such.

3. Number of targets. What is best for multiple targets or single targets.

4. Commonality of high save. In my experience, Fort is usually the highest save on most creatures. Will and Reflex are relatively equal. You're almost always good using a reflex save spell. Not only because it is often the weakest or at least equivalent save, but the spells do half damage on a success which can still be quite substantial for a lot of spells.

5. Weaknesses, resistance, immunities. These are not as important since they add moderate damage that can't be doubled or halved. So as long as you land some damage, you'll activate a weakness. But the weakness is only worth adding if the base spell does enough damage to justify its use over another spell.

Martials are much better at activating weakness damage since they do it every hit.

6. How does spell interact with the group? Even if you RK and determine a weak save, does it matter if you want to use synesthesia or vision of death to give a rider so all your party members will get a bonus to hit?

Synesthesia is still likely to last for one round. It may not take more than one round to do the job.

This idea of attacking weakest save isn't as relevant as with PF1/3E where success or failure was the only consideration.

That's why I said I used RK in nearly every fight in PF1. Lots of creatures had immunity, strong resistances, spell resistance, and the like. You needed to know how to bypass them. Weakest save mattered as there was success or failure. That's it.

In PF2 that is not the case. Success or failure is one of many factors and not the most important one.

Even if you learn a creature has a weak reflex save and strong fort save, it may still be more effective to chain cast slow to defeat it rather than try a reflex or will save against. It depends on the effectiveness of the spell available.

All I know for certain is I rarely use RK. I rarely have a problem not doing so. Most spells work on most things. Very few things are immune to anything. The most common immunities I've run into are fire and mental. If they're immune to mental, most of your mental spells are useless even if that is the weakest save.

So it is often best to rely on Reflex saves or spells lacking the mental tag or doing mental damage unless you know for certain they will do something make them worth using.

PF2 is a very different game than PF1/3E where RK and missing the save was very important and very effective meaning if the save was failed, you pretty much won the encounter. There aren't spells like that any longer.

This argument comes down to the value of RK. I think the reason sorcerers have sorcererous potency is because they are bad at RK checks. The game expects wizards to more consistently be hitting the weakest save and sorcerers to be guessing most of the time.

If this is not the result playing out in game its not the wizards design at fault.

Not really. Intelligence used to give a huge skill advantage in PF1.

Skills are easy to come by at a trained level in PF2. So the focus is on proficiency. Intelligence gives no advantage in proficiency.

At best you can do like some do spending skill feats on additional lore which auto-scales and uses intelligence to give a minor advantage on often unnecessary RK checks that cost an action that use intelligence.

You know how often I used RK in PF1? All the time, nearly every battle. It was a free action, intelligence based, and wizards were the undisputed kings of knowledge skills.

You know how often I use RK in PF2? Almost never. Religion and Nature for some RK skills are wisdom based. Proficiency matters big in this edition. Lore skills are narrow so additional lore might not cover everything. And the more importantly nothing is immune to almost anything anymore, even the immune creatures are obvious like a red dragon immune to fire or devils. So you don't even need to RK any more to figure out how to beat creatures. And it costs 1 action to maybe gain a minor unnecessary advantage while martials just hit it to determine what works against it and 99% of the time hitting it works.

I love how every complaint about the Wizard ignores half the character build in order to justify their complaint. The wizards school is weak when compared to the sorcerer blood line! Well it should be because it’s only half the equation you also have the arcane thesis to consider both those combined is easily equal to a Sorcerer’s bloodline.

“ I wish the designers would admit this and get rid of it. Make the wizard a four slot caster like the sorc. There's not point in keeping them a 3 slot caster with special rules to become 4 slot. Their innate class abilities just don't warrant the 3 slot limit like the witch hexes do.”. This is just stupid Wizards have 4 slots you just have to choose one of your curriculum spell. In fact a Wizard runs more slots that a Sorcerer generally especially if the take the Staff Thesis.

The truth of the matter if you know how to run a Wizard your generally more powerful than a Sorcerer but a Wizard has a much higher learning curve than a Sorcerer. There’s no real thought behind a Sorcerer no learning needed at all it’s casting on easy mode while a Wizard is far more powerful once you learn how.

This is not true. I'm not sure why people keep claiming this.

I know casters as well as you can know them. I've played the wizard as my primary in every edition of D&D they existed. I play more casters than martials by a good margin.

There is this niche that keeps making the claim the wizard is stronger than the sorcerer and they are not. I have about as good a system mastery as exists in PF2, 5E, PF1, 3E, 3.5E, 2nd edition, and 1st edition. I'm an old school player focused primarily on casters.

If you have system mastery in PF2, then the spontaneous casters are better by a good margin.

In PF1 wizards were king by a mile. Best class in the game. Slow start, but spectacularly powerful at high level. If you have system mastery as I did, then you know why they were so much better in PF1/3E.

Just as if you have system mastery in PF2, you know why spontaneous casters are better in PF2. The main reason being because changing out spells is not longer very valuable. There aren't alpha spells any more. There aren't silver bullet spells any more. There is only the casting of the same most powerful spell over and over and over again. And spontaneous casters do that better than prepared casters.

That's how PF2 works. The class features of the spontaneous casters are generally better.

I don't know why you are holding on on to this old paradigm when wizards could find those perfect spells like PF1/3E when such spells no longer exist. There is no immunity to energy spells castable on a whole group anymore. No mobile individual wind walls that ruin archers. No mass hold monsters. No dominate that ends battles. No enervate or energy drain that automatically adds negative levels with no saves. Very few longer duration party buffs. No cheap wands. No ability enhancing spells. There isn't even a mass fly spell anymore.

The new paradigm is simple, straightforward, and narrow. Very few spell slots. Very few mass buff spells.

And in this new paradigm, the wizard is not that great. The spontaneous casters, specifically the sorcerer and bard are much better than they are. They are even more versatile users of magic.

When I hear a person make the claim wizards are better, it clearly shows they haven't even bothered to learn all that sorcerers and spontaneous casters can do. If they did have system mastery and knew sorcs, they would know that 45 spells known and 1 they can change out every day is more than enough to match anything the wizard can come up with.

Basically bake Unleash Psyche in the amping of psi cantrips ?

Like "While your psyche is unleashed your psi cantrip's are amplified, dealing their effect listed in their "unleashed" section."

And the feat amps then are a separate thing, amps being the ability to spend focus points to add an effect to psi-cantrips. Those can be gotten from archetype, while the unleash cannot.

Sure, something like that as long as they make Unleash Psyche last longer.

I am still not sure how they thought 2 rounds was enough for Unleash Psyche. No one in my group has been able to make much use of Unleash Psyche the way it is current constructed. It is one of the most limiting abilities I've ever seen with a terrible, terrible, bad, shouldn't have been done design that makes the caster stupefied after use. It would be the equivalent of making barbarian rage cause a barbarian to get a -2 penalty to their attacks or more after using rage. It's super bad design.

Unleash Psyche lasting 2 rounds then applying the stupefied condition reducing the psychics spell DCs and attack modifiers while requiring them to make a roll to cast was something I'm surprised made it past class testing. How did anyone that ran the class ok this?

The psychic needs as much, if not more work, than the with pre-Remaster witch to make it viable.

I like the Remastered Oracle. I do miss some of the unique powers, but only one or two were any good. In the future, I'd like some more refinement. But the base chassis of the oracle is very good. I'm glad they made the change as the new oracle is much more playable than the old one.

About all I would like in the future is some refinement of the curses and unique oracle powers to make the class feel more like the curses give abilities that fit their theme.

Didn't think they could make the wizard more limited and worse in the Remaster, but somehow they managed it.

I hope they get rid of the school tied to spell slots mechanic and make curriculums provide unique abilities and focus spells. The spell slots tied to curriculum mechanic doesn't translate well to PF2. I wish the designers would admit this and get rid of it. Make the wizard a four slot caster like the sorc. There's not point in keeping them a 3 slot caster with special rules to become 4 slot. Their innate class abilities just don't warrant the 3 slot limit like the witch hexes do.

If they remaster the psychic, they could fix the imaginary weapon problem by building the psychic more like the oracle making the psychic amps work off a different resource than focus points. If they model it in that direction, then they won't have to worry about poaching.

I think the Remastered Oracle curse mechanic is a better way to build a Remastered psychic by giving the psychic a unique resource pool that allows it to do its psychic things more often while also having meaningful focus spells. Psychic limitations of 3 focus points a battle was pretty limiting in groups like I run with where you don't slow down when you start to run a dungeon or encounter area. I think an additional resource pool tied to their psychic abilities would give them more endurance than the limited focus point system they currently run on.

And it would fix the imaginary weapon problem by allowing them to tag it with some psychic ability tag that isn't easy to access for other classes. It would solve a lot of problems with making the psychic a more unique class with less poachable power.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I haven't had to fix too much in PF2. But I do have a handful of house rules that fix some abilities. We did the same fix with Nimble Dodge as Ectar.

The character Roshan, who uses Assurance, also learned Nimble Dodge. I posted in our Discord group asking whether we should use Ectar's houserule. She replied, "We've already been doing it that way."

Roshan's player is my elder daughter and has played in my Pathfinder games since I began gamemastering in 2011, until she moved to Seattle. She rejoined my Pathfinder games when we went online in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I guess I lost track of my houserule decisions over the 6 years since we began playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

We were already doing it too. Just seemed the right way to to run it. Then someone on the forums pointed out that was the wrong way to run it, so I wrote it fit the way we were already running it.

It just seems like a more worthwhile ability if the player has an idea of when it will work given all the competing reactions. It doesn't feel great to use your reaction and have it fail to help at all.

Problem is imaginary weapon is perfectly fine for the psychic. It is perfectly fine for every other class. The only class it breaks is the magus or maybe Eldritch Archer. The only real fix it needs is to close the ability to use it with spellstrike.

Can you take a rare background like Amnesiac? That might help you get one more ability increase and a kind DM will allow you to spend it where you need it.

I'm doing a fire and metal kineticist with an oracle of fire build as well in a Blood Lords campaign. He's a skeleton. It's my Ghost Rider build. It's not purely optimal, but it is sure fun.

The incendiary aura with Thermal Nimbus is brutal. Massive passive damage to anything that burns.

AestheticDialectic wrote:

Sir, it's 120 feet of shapeable 10 foot sections. That's up to 12 sections enemies would have to break to get through. It doesn't matter if it can be broken in one hit. Wall of force is always one shape and the whole thing breaks when its HP is drained. You don't have to look at Wall of Stone only in such a linear fashion. It has endless possibilities of arrangements for sectioning off enemies and wasting actions, not to mention the difficult terrain. If an enemy waits for you to break it, don't cave in the stalemate. Force them to act, use the time to position yourself and do what you would do when you throw a dude into a quandary

But the game isn't only combat either, you can do so many things with wall of stone that you cannot do with wall of force. You can't even make a dome like 5e. It certainly is more sturdy, but outside of holding ghosts it's hard to find such a limited design as useful

And wall of stone works better than force for fliers because you can angle it. That's all. It depends a little on interpretation but raw seems to allow you to connect two angled walls to trap smaller flying enemies maybe. I just didn't know why they thought wall of force did anything to fliers

Actually it's shapeable on a per 5ft basis ("placing each 5 feet of the wall"). For some reason the damage is tracked in 10ft panels though. But anyways, my point exactly: You control how the wall is shaped, curving it around enemies and layering it as you wish.

I've gotten so much mileage out of this thing. You can take an extreme+ horde of monsters and make them trickle in like a wave encounter. Who gives a s+@$ if they hide behind the wall, that just means we have more time to kill their buddies. Any and all chokepoints can be controlled and if there aren't any on the map you can make your own and park a martial right in the only entrance.

As for wall of force and fliers, that's just cause wall of force can be off the ground and wall of stone can't. The angle thing doesn't...

I haven't needed wall of stone past the levels I stated. Not sure what mooks you're fighting that somehow get slowed down by your wall of stone maze. That wouldn't work very well for our games.

We kill mooks very, very fast. We don't want them coming through slowly because we draw large groups of mooks in at high level and nuke them to nothing. If they're spread out behind a wall of stone, then they aren't well grouped for the nuke hammer.

If you're playing some level 9 to 13 range game, then wall of stone is useful. For higher level games past level 13 where you can start dropping chain lightnings and eclipse bursts, you don't want to some wall interfering with the nuke hammer.

Thus we don't need wall of stone to do what you're doing. We either use the actual dungeon walls in a dungeon or structure to narrow the battle and if outside, we long range nuke hammer groups. We use the distance they have to cover to get to as action problems, then whatever survives the nuke hammer we clean up.

If you have fun creating little stone wall mazes to slow down groups that you can't nuke or cut down, then have at it. We do not find it necessary.

1. Do you like the current animist class overall?

Not sure. It's a very messy class with very narrow builds. As a power gamer, I don't like that any practice but Liturgist feels bad and makes the class feel weak.

The sustain on vessel spells, the core feature of the class, is problematic without Liturgist. It makes the animist weak and practically unplayable in the type of games I play where we do care how we perform compared to other classes. I would prefer all the practices be competitive options.

They need to fix the sustain of the vessel spell so that Liturgist is not the only viable path for playable vessel spells.

2. Do you think it is too powerful?

I think Apparition's Quickening is too powerful for blaster builds. Quicken up to 3 times per day at max level is really strong.

Maybe Forest's Heart, but at 16th level everyone is getting powerful. The best part of Forest Heart is the 30 foot reach and how it interacts when I take Rogue Archetype and Gang Up giving everyone off-guard within 30 feet as a passive ability while I still cast spells. But you can't use Channeler's Stance when using Forest's Heart, so a bit of a tradeoff.

I think the Liturgist sustain makes the class playable. Without the Liturgist sustain, the class is bad and underperforming. That one practice is necessary to make the animist playable, not overpowered. If you take Medium or any other practice, the animist goes from "That looks too strong" to this class is pathetic and action starved having to sustain its vessel spell, move, and try to do something else.

3. Do you think it is too complicated? It isn't for me. I think it is too clunky for my tastes and the ability to change apparitions makes it feel to flexible to feel like a class that you can make different unique builds with. You play one animist, you can access every apparition. So you don't feel any sense of attachment to a spirit. You're just the guy who changes the same spirits as every single other animist in existence.

There is no unique animist that is aligned with some powerful spirit that defines their relationship to the spirit world. Every single animist in the game whether a PC or NPC can all access the same group of spirits with some preparation.

I would have preferred a more unique feeling animist. When you align with the battle spirits, you stand out as a battle animist focused on spirits of war. But that is not how it works. You can switch it up with some prep and be battle guy one day or one battle, then fire blaster, then water spirit guy, and so on all on the same character like every other animist in existence.

The animist is probably the least unique class in the game. If you want to play a powerful animist, you just take Liturgist and then whatever the best apparitions are for a given task. Then repeat it over and over again with almost no growth or unique build options.

It's a messy class with some good ideas that could use another pass or two to make it feel like a unique, interesting class with multiple playable builds.

Is it just me, or does this thread largely feel like the same points have been getting repeated for like 4 pages?

No. You're right. That's where nearly every thread leads that is any length.

If the animist is over-powered or whatever people want to claim, it will show up at tables. For me, it isn't. I think the class is fine, but not particularly interesting. It's a class they tried to put too much into it and made it an unfocused class with a messy play-style.

Personally, I think only Apparition's Quickening could use a look as that does exceed what every other caster can do. To give one caster three quickens per day versus one for every other caster seems imbalanced.

Sustain spells aren't that good no matter how many people on this thread claim they are. I play a lot of high level casters. There are way better spells than the ones people are posting to use for the double sustain that do direct damage or have other effects. They post these spells like we're all supposed to go, "Oooohhh, so strong." Yet I'd rather use Eclipse Burst and cast a Phantom Orchestra to sustain, one of the few spells worth a cast and sustain action.

I'd much rather have a real martial than a pretend martial that needs a spell for regular hits and doesn't have any feats that really let them do more powerful martial abilities. And that has to elf step all the time to keep their schtick going when we might need someone that will Sudden Charge or fly after some enemy in the air that is moving very fast.

The animist isn't breaking my games even when power gamers make them. All the stuff Teridax posts is nothing that would work very well in our games. All of it completely ignores distance when engagement starts and everything else well built martials and casters can do as well as general battle movements and anything the enemy can do.

Even yesterday we were fighting a creature with a 20 foot reach whip that could grapple easily and move targets around the battlefield with the whip. It had a powerful fire aura. And some crazy mobility and AOE spells it could drop at range. Against such an enemy, I'd love to see the Elf Step strategy while this creature is moving 80 feet plus a round with dimension door all the time.

And it was immune to fire. So fire wasn't going to work so great against it. How diverse are the animists damage spells? Not so diverse from what I've seen.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I'm a power gamer that plays with mostly power gamers. I'm telling you from that perspective that it doesn't look very broken to me except Apparition Quickening which you still have to plan for. That is the one feat that is a bit broken as Quickening multiple times per day is pretty strong.

I mostly just want to clarify that I think it is the best class in the game, not that it is broken, or overpowered as one might think of it. I think it is problematic design, but it won't necessarily ruin people's games if you have a socially conscious player at the helm. I think the resentment witch for example is both the best debuffer and the best occult caster in the game atm, and I while don't think an animist is *quite on that level* I do think it makes a convincing doppelganger but is simultaneously able to pivot out of that easily and do someone else's schtick to similar degree of competency.

You talk about how some of the heights of power come from picking things like elf step, but this is the kind of thing that really makes this bothersome. Regardless of whether people purposefully play suboptimally or not, that potential exists

Edit for some clarity and spelling errors

I can't say as I agree. I think the animist is a narrow power class with some very specific paths for performance, otherwise it underperforms.

I think the bard is still the best occult caster. I think the resentment witch is good, but their familar has to get too close to the battle. At the levels I play a lot at, familiars are going to have trouble making their saves to survive all that AOE stuff from high level enemies with gazes, auras, and the like.

There is reason I harp on distance. The high level stuff has so much nasty passive stuff that hammers groups or AOE attack or blasting capabilities. Then there is also the crazy mobility of higher level creatures. It's rough on things on animal companions, familiars, or soft target casters that get too close.

If you take away a feat like Apparition's Quickening away, they really lose a lot of their luster.

PF2 is a very fast game. I do not find sustain spells to be very powerful compared to an equivalent direct damage spell. It is played in a group setting where you have other well built characters bringing the hammer further increasing the speed a battle ends, which makes sustain spells even less useful.

I don't think worrying about Elf Step is worthwhile. You should be more concerned with Apparition Quickening than Elf Step with Liturgist. You are experienced enough to know that a good direct damage spell is often far, far more useful than a sustain damage spell.

You should be looking at two things with the animist:

1. How well do they deliver direct damage and how often.

2. How fast can they bring to bear martial damage and how good are their saves to stand up to gazes, auras, and the like.

This is the kind of stuff that matters as you level up. It's not just can I do this thing with a reasonable level of competence. It's how fast can can I bring to bear my power in terms of ease of set up and sustain and switching targets.

Having specced and tested the animist, it's ability to do so is not as good as being sold. That's why the animist is not dominating or breaking PF2.

Animist versatility is not needed in groups with well built, focused PCs with strong classes. The animist may look impressive in an inexperienced group when played by an experienced player. In an experienced group, it's a class with versatility that doesn't match what the focused classes do with a group that is already accustomed to working together.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Bust-R-Up wrote:

Ajaxius wrote:

[W]eapons are pretty broadly effective based on design, force, and technique. Realism generally sides with, "size doesn't matter."

This only applies when those weapons are being wielded by beings of roughly similar size and anatomy in one-on-one conditions. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. You're not going to put a 4'9" person of slight build up against a 6'5" monster and expect anything like a fair fight.

Yeah. That's reality. Another reason to avoid putting it in a fantasy game.

... Realism or believability doesn't have to be that tight.

True but it would be nice if it mattered somewhat. Just a little something to add flavour.

I'm not really interested in weapon size. Leverage ie weapon + arm length does mean that a smaller person can hurt the larger.

I would just like there to be something relevant about creature size especially around athletics - and there is basically nothing. Yes it is just a design decision Paizo made to keep the game simple and fanastic, but it is one I would not make.

If your table is ok with it, then work it in I guess.

You want to ask yourself if you want to tell someone at your table that their Red Sonja female gnome is going to be weaker for believable race gender reasons? I didn't feel like it was necessary, so I didn't bother.

My players are all male. Even they get so bored of making "alpha male number X-infinity" that some started making female or flawed characters to role-play a change of pace. We figured a female or smaller person has to deal with the reality of their genetics in real life, so why the heck would we make them suffer real world limitations in a fantasy game?

Even myself. I'm not as big as Halfthor Bjornson, but I'm a guy that lifts weights as a hobby. I'm 5'11" and 280 lbs. I easily bench 300 plus, squat 300 plus and been up to 500, and deadlift over 400 and up to 500. I overhead press 235 lbs standing free bar. Most people in the world can't even do that. I'm considered just ok in any kind of powerlifting gym or serious weightlifting gym. I can do this as easily as I can do it because I'm a strong male with good genetics for strength. I've always been strong since I was young. This is just random luck of genetics.

I don't feel the need to make people feel the limitations of their genetics in a fantasy game. Everyone deals with their genetics in real life. Fantasy games should be a place where your genetics don't matter much and you get to be some superhero style fantasy hero that can do stuff that is impossible in the real world.

I guess it comes down to individual tables deciding if that slight bit of realism is worth making rules for. My table said no, even way back in the early days of D&D. If you got a table that wants that touch of realism, I say house rule it up.

Ajaxius wrote:

[W]eapons are pretty broadly effective based on design, force, and technique. Realism generally sides with, "size doesn't matter."

This only applies when those weapons are being wielded by beings of roughly similar size and anatomy in one-on-one conditions. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. You're not going to put a 4'9" person of slight build up against a 6'5" monster and expect anything like a fair fight.

Yeah. That's reality. Another reason to avoid putting it in a fantasy game.

I remember when Gygax inserted some of this in the way, way back time. Max strength by race and gender. My buddies and I got rid of it back in the early 80s when we were playing because it's a fantasy game and even we didn't want that kind of limitation on the game. It was all arbitrary and artificial.

If you wanted to play a super buff female gnome that can wield a greataxe that is the gnome version of Red Sonja, then go for it. We didn't care.

That's why I don't consider weapon size and such important. This is a game of high fantasy with casters launching lightning using words and hand gestures, martials that can leap 60 feet or more in the air, and fighters that can go one on one with ancient dragons that are gargantuan size.

I find it difficult to believe that weapon size is interfering with believability when you're perfectly willing to accept some 10 ton dragon that can breathe fire can be fought by some 200 to 250 lb. warrior with a steel longsword toe to toe.

It would be like a cartoon:

Player 1: I can't believe that halfing can wield a full-sized greatsword. That's so unbelievable. It's ridciulous.

Player 2: The 100 foot tall titan just showed up sent down by the gods to destroy us all. You ready to fight it with your +4 flaming longsword?

Player 1: Yeah. I'm ready. I can't wait to waste it. Shouldn't be too hard a fight. I just wish that new player wasn't playing a halfling wielding that full-sized greatsword. That is just ruining my day. It's taking me out of the game world.

Realism or believability doesn't have to be that tight.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

PF2 players do gain more power. They just don't gain enough power to win alone or turn the enemies into a joke.

I've played several characters from level 1 to 17 to 20 in PF1 and PF2. Main difference is in PF1 the power scaled so the DM had to build encounters outside the rules to effectively challenge the PCs because the rule system did not hold up at all. The power scaling was so heavily in favor of the PCs in PF1 that any attempt to challenge the players required extensive work as well as extensive system mastery to do so. I had to calculate average damage per round of a PC group as well as the save DCs of selected spells with feats like Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection to counter those specific, nigh unbeatable combinations. I had to do so by going outside the rule system in PF2 because the capabilities of PF1 PCs was far outside the ability of rules to provide a challenge. The game was essentially broken past level 12 to 15. That isn't narrative impact, that is narrative destruction. The narrative became irrelevant because the player choices had enabled them to bypass the system's ability to challenge them.

PF2 the players still get stronger and very, very strong in the 12 to 20 range. But not so strong that the system can't create challenges. You are still forced to engage with the narrative challenges, while not being able to destroy them.

You still get to launch powerful AOE. YOu can still beat the bosses. You can still beat all the challenges. Your decisions, tactics, and abilities still influence the narrative heavily. In fact, they are influence the narrative more than they did in PF1 because you have to play well in PF2 because you don't get to win the game by choosing some broken combination of spells and abilities not well tested by the design team that led to narrative destruction.

This idea that you can't or don't impact the narrative in PF2 is a false one. You have to engage with the narrative in PF2 because you can't win during character

...

I think they will do like they did in the past and some of the material will be good and some won't. When you produce as many books as Paizo, they won't be as good as the Core Rulebook.

The only games I've seen avoid this was game companies that don't produce many books. Even in those games the options are not all the same quality or value. So what you're asking for is something I haven't seen from any game company, so I'm not sure why Paizo would be able to pull off what no game company I've ever seen has pulled off putting out similar games.

And PF2 is not that complex. I'm not sure why you see it as complex. It's a pretty simple game. It's not as simple as 5E, but not as a complex as PF1. The rangebound nature of the game makes it pretty easy to play, even easier than 5E which is broken once someone with system mastery gets ahold of it as my players did.

If anyone that did not play PF1 wants to see why PF2 should avoid weapon size, looking up the 3E/PF1 rules for increasing weapon size. You'll see why they just didn't bother. It's too hard to balance.

I used weapon size rules to my advantage all the time in 3E/PF1. They were especially good with multi-dice weapons or natural weapons. Monks really had fun with increased size for their fists.

About the only fighting styles that didn't benefit from increased weapon size were ranged attackers from what I recall because weapons resized back to normal size as soon as they left your grasp. Maybe I'm wrong on that as it has been a long while since I used that PF1/3E weapon size exploit to make my weapon die larger and do more damage.

I find this conversation interesting in a lot of ways, the biggest of those being game historical.

What I find interesting is that if you look back at 1E D&D, you find why the big weapons have larger damage dice.

They are slower to use.

See, back in 1E, everyone rolled, I think it was a d10+dex mod (which was lower) for Initiative. That was when you first went, and when you went next was determined by what you did.

If you cast a spell, your spell had a casting time, and it actually resolved when that casting time ended, and if you were hit before then, you lost the spell.

But, every *weapon* also had a speed rating, and the bigger it was, the more time that was. A greatsword had I 9, I think, and a dagger had a 2.

So, if you are using that greatsword and go at 10, and a person with a dagger also goes at 10, it sequence would be:

You and the dagger guy at 10, dagger at 12, dagger at 14, dagger at 16, dagger at 18, and then you at 19.

Bigger weapons traded attacks for damage, and it was a thing you had to think about. If you brought a greatsword to a fight with a couple of rogues, you might well be poked to death before swinging a second time.

And if you brought a polearm, I'd feel bad for you.

But, while quite realistic, it was a cumbersome system to use, and was eventually tossed, but the damage dice were not changed, and that brings us to 50 years later, where people argue, 'why does a large and slow weapon that is made larger and slower not do more damage?', and that just amuses me.

Now, if I were going to bring something back, weapon-wise, from the past, it would be the penalty for someone with a reach weapon to hit someone who was right next to them, but I suspect a lot of people would not like that.

Yep. I remember it. Big, slow heavy hitting weapons. You could get a few attacks with a dagger or small weapon before a big weapon got to go.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Squiggit wrote:

Witch of Miracles wrote:

These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them.

It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation.

Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.

Maybe you've simply had different experiences than me, but the proportion of those players to other kinds of players has been unusually high in PF2E. At no point did I say those posters don't exist elsewhere. I simply feel like they make up an unusually large percentage of participants (emphasis on unusually). My experience is that most of the people who grow really attached to PF2E and talk about it online are attached to the mechanical aspect of the game, and they're attached to it as a game. Not as many Vorthoses in online discussion, to drag out that term from discussing types of MtG players, but a whole lot of spikes.

Another way of putting it is that lot of other crunchy RPGs have commenters who're invested in the mechanics, but like the crunch as a form of

...

PF2 players do gain more power. They just don't gain enough power to win alone or turn the enemies into a joke.

I've played several characters from level 1 to 17 to 20 in PF1 and PF2. Main difference is in PF1 the power scaled so the DM had to build encounters outside the rules to effectively challenge the PCs because the rule system did not hold up at all. The power scaling was so heavily in favor of the PCs in PF1 that any attempt to challenge the players required extensive work as well as extensive system mastery to do so. I had to calculate average damage per round of a PC group as well as the save DCs of selected spells with feats like Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection to counter those specific, nigh unbeatable combinations. I had to do so by going outside the rule system in PF2 because the capabilities of PF1 PCs was far outside the ability of rules to provide a challenge. The game was essentially broken past level 12 to 15. That isn't narrative impact, that is narrative destruction. The narrative became irrelevant because the player choices had enabled them to bypass the system's ability to challenge them.

PF2 the players still get stronger and very, very strong in the 12 to 20 range. But not so strong that the system can't create challenges. You are still forced to engage with the narrative challenges, while not being able to destroy them.

You still get to launch powerful AOE. YOu can still beat the bosses. You can still beat all the challenges. Your decisions, tactics, and abilities still influence the narrative heavily. In fact, they are influence the narrative more than they did in PF1 because you have to play well in PF2 because you don't get to win the game by choosing some broken combination of spells and abilities not well tested by the design team that led to narrative destruction.

This idea that you can't or don't impact the narrative in PF2 is a false one. You have to engage with the narrative in PF2 because you can't win during character creation so you destroy the narrative making the DM nothing more than a game engine for a power fantasy.

If narrative destruction is what you're looking for, then yeah, PF2 doesn't let you destroy the narrative during character creation. If narrative impact and engagement is what you're looking for, then PF2 does a much better job because you have to engage with the narrative and fight challenging enemies that you can't easily beat in character creation due to a broken rule system.

It would have been funnier if they had taken his body and thrown it in some monster room, then shot him blowing him up. Balor Bomb. High level character tactic.

Loreguard wrote:

I'll grant that first reading Second Edition rules, I found there not being a change in damage for size changes was a bit perplexing. However, it didn't take much to explain SOME of it away quickly. Simply put, putting a giant's sword in the hand of a medium person and expecting it to do more damage, when the weapon clearly wasn't made for an individual or that size, when you think about it, actually made sense it wouldn't cause more damage. (in fact, it maybe should do less damage if you want to cite 'realism') The leverage and such would simply not provide that much advantage, and might literally make it worse. So from that standpoint, it made perfect sense to not have it affect die size unlike how it had in first edition. A two handed sword in the hands of a gnome, may very well do more damage to someone than a longsword in the hand of a human. The gnome is using the leverage of multiple arms, vs. the human's one hand. And if using two hands, not optimized for two hands, just using it for a little extra.

Where I have to admit the 'view' seems to fail is when a Tiny Sprite's longbow, and its arrow does more damage than a human's short bow. The long bow is supposed to do more damage because it is bigger/better leverage right... but it doesn't in this case, it is smaller.

In the game, the game doesn't differentiate between small and medium... they are considered the same size, just with two different sized creatures using them. That seems a reasonable abstraction for me, though it took some getting used to. But it did bring up the idea that while considering them a S/M combined size, it seemed like there could be an acknowledgement of other sizes.

I don't think I'd considered the idea of boosting the floor or reducing the ceiling of damage, but I had considered size differences past the S/M baseline having a +1 damage (or +1 per die) bonus per the size. I imagine someone is going to complain that it hurts their sprite concept, but I honestly don't think a sprite

...

Damage is built around levels and hit points. You can configure however you want to make it believable, but the game is still built so damage is rangebound according to level and hit points.

This was done to ensure fights stay roughly the same duration regardless of level give or take a round.

PF2 is built for balance, not believability as you call it. So if you want believability for size, then adjust for yourself as most of us want balance over believability. We don't want gamified believability that does nothing more than provide some damage advantage that breaks the game.

A PF2 DM can adjust the damage portion that comes from "size" if you want to make it believable. Regardless the damage is built for a certain range of damage according to level. The composition of that damage is up to the DM to modify if they want some believability or what not.

I never saw weapon size as making things believable in PF1. Hit points aren't very believable. Being blown up by meteors or lightning isn't very believable or swinging a great axe with the same ease as a shortsword. Or firing a longbow 5 or 6 times a round.

I don't have much interest in believability over a game I can run that doesn't break past certain levels making the game even more unbelievable when players are able to easily kill ancient dragons with their tiny swords even for a medium character.

My group has not noticed this change and doesn't care. PF1 wasn't realistic with weapons. Most of these weapons are built for realism. They're all very generic.

The only thing that has an effect in PF2 is the weapon die size because of striking runes. You want the biggest possible die you can get because of how striking runes work.

Otherwise, nothing else really matters when it comes to weapons. Maybe the deadly or fatal traits for crit focused classes.

If you are using a published adventure and don’t like applying the Weak adjustment to everything, allow the PCs to be one level higher than the adventure calls for. It achieves about the same thing.

This can work too. Good mention. Weaken the encounters or let the PCs be a level above.

As a 1e purist who came into this thread to see what was going on with all of you were discussing, one thing that I think a lot of you are missing is that many of the aspects you're discussing about the way 2e is built was a direct counter/answer to the complaints of 1e GMs who came to Paizo complaining that their players had too many ways of affecting the narrative in any meaningful fashion. There's a reason why people say that 2e is one of the most GM-friendly games out there right now, and it's not just because Paizo made many of the effects and abilities easy to just plop into your game with the expectation that it will "just work".

Many other things, like the Rarity system, which was initially sold to us as a way to explain why you shouldn't be able to easily find a +3 Flaming Katana in the middle of a secluded village in the heart of Cheliax, quickly was revealed as its true purpose to being a way for Paizo to gate literally any spell, special ability, or ritual behind a wall basically labeled "These Abilities (which we know we can't get rid of entirely because otherwise people will riot) Can Break The Narrative Flow Of Your Campaign". And the entire game of 2e is built that way: the only way to conclude a battle is to make your opponent's HP fall below 0 (both magical and mundane means of defeating foes are either non-existent or gated behind the Incapacitation tag, rendering it non-effective against anyone 90+% of who you'd actually want to use it on), almost every unique form of long distance transportation or communication is behind The Gate, unique class features in 1e like the Paladin's immunity to fear is now a piddly +1, etc.

2e Paizo does not, and from the start of this system has NEVER, wanted players to be able to have serious narrative control over the flow of the campaigns they're running unless the GM wills it. All of that stuff you brought up, Mathmuse? The examples of the heroes of myth who engaged in physics-breaking acts of heroics, like Hercules changing the course of a mighty...

Of course the wizard winning alone was the better way.

There is no more narrative control in PF1 than in PF2. There was just far too powerful of characters centered around magic that allowed them win alone and live a power fantasy that only the 3E/PF1 version of magic ever allowed.

This did not exist in original D&D, 2nd edition, 4th edition, or even 5th. 3E/PF1 was the only edition of D&D where the players were given the power to win alone if you picked the right class and had system mastery. The main classes this included were casters. If you were a martial, well too bad for you. It's a casters world and you're just living in it.

That is not narrative control. That is power for power's sake and people who abused it. Then tried to rule lawyer DMs that wouldn't allow it.

My goodness I do not miss the rule lawyer rubbish from PF1/3E. That was the most tiresome addition to D&D I ever dealt with in my 40 plus years of playing. "The rules say my game breaking character works and you can't do anything about it DM."

And that is what some refer to as character agency...being able to break the game and make it trivial. Just to ruin DMing to the point you grew tired of even trying to make a challenge for characters with abilities so whacky powerful that monsters can't possibly challenge them unless heavily modified to do so.

It really seems both of you would rather skill feats be separated out into combat effective ones and ones designed for other modes of play, because then you could easily direct your players away from all the out of combat feats across the board, but still have skill feats that do interesting things in combat. Like it is fine if you would completely ignore the out of combat side of things. I get that you worry that the developers would spend more time developing out of combat skill feats if they were separate categories, but they already are designing those, they are just grouped in with all the other skill feats and it is recreating the problem that prevented anyone from taking g skill affecting feats in PF1, and why skill feats exist in PF2 in the first place: to not compete with combat resources.

To be honest with you, yes.

A lot of the feats don't work anyway. You have something like Quick Coercion that takes a round when Coercion is only usable in Exploration mode. So what does the action cost do anyway?

Something like Coercion or Diplomacy work when the DM decides they work regardless of the mode. The skill feats only slightly alter this and only if you're keeping careful track of time for something like making Gather Information faster, which rarely comes up.

All of this stuff is better handled with the DM using the narrative to decide how it works in conjunction with the players rather than trying to create these skill feats that don't really do much to improve the out of combat role-play unless the DM decides there is some time constraint that might make something useful.

It seems players and DMs can work with loose guidelines to make out of combat RP fun and interesting. The skill feats add stuff that almost forces a DM to find ways to make them useful. After a while, even the player stops asking because it doesn't do much but make the DM create artificial uses for the out of combat skill feats that don't flow naturally with the narrative.

three casters (warpriest, occult witch, wizard) a single full martial (scoundrel rogue) and a frontlines kineticist. They started at level 1, and they are just about to reach level 8 next session.

Gonna give you the honest truth:

1. There is no such thing as a frontline kineticist. 8 hit point classes that don't get Master Armor until level 19 will never be a frontline class unless you really weaken the encounters.

2. Warpriest is ok. Without a champion, fighter, barb, or true frontline 10 hit point class they can heal, they are going to get wasted a lot.

3. Two prepared 6 hit point casters in the group ain't great. Spontaneous is much stronger in PF2.

4. Scoundrel rogue is the worst rogue. Only the thief and ruffian are good. Scoundrel is played by those with system mastery that can manage a weak class for their own amusement.

Your group hamstrung themselves by starting out building a pretty weak party. At least in PF2 such a party can survive, but it's not going to feel great.

1. 8 hit point classes with weak armor classes don't stand up very well in PF2 against bosses. They get crit real easy.

Recommendation: I houseruled that a PC can pick up their weapon while standing up as part of the same move action. It feels terrible to require to two actions to stand up and pick up their weapon.

2. Your PCs should be looking to go first and do that to the bosses. Trip them, slow them, take their actions, and give your party the action advantage. Combat maneuvers in PF2 are part of good group play. A control martial is extremely powerful in PF2. Another reason why a kineticist is not a great frontline character. They use powers and you want a 10 hit point martial using combat maneuvers.

3. Mobility is huge in PF2. You have to choose spells and effects to drop a mobile enemy, especially a flier. Haste your group. Put fly on your control martial as trip knocks flyers to the ground. Pick up Earthbind. And use ranged power with the Reach Metamagic feat if necessary.

Reach Metamagic feat is the most powerful and useful metamagic feat in the game other than Quicken which is usable once per day. Take Reach on every caster you can.

4. Another reason to have a frontline martial as high fort and will saves with the success becomes a critical success really help with those effects like auras, poison, gazes, and the like.

5. Avoid incap spells. Focus on spells that have a good result on a success like slow. Crit successes suck, but you can find spells that do something on a success. It's very important that your casters vet spells by tags like avoiding incap and looking at what happens on a success.

6. This is why you need a big weapon martial that can pound through hardness. Construct hardness breaks after a certain damage threshhold, but you a group of soft hitters that likely have problems breaking it.

d4 cantrips on the casters. A rogue that doesn't get dex to damage. A kineticist using impulses with maybe an ok strength for d6 to d8 damage with maybe strength that is hard to boost with weapon runes. Maybe your warpriest can hit hard, but not sure how you built it.

Put a fighter or barb or champion in that group with a big weapon, high strength, and high athletics using a maneuver and you'll see the difference.

As far as DMing, create some house rules that don't break the game. I like to combine drawing weapons with movement like PF1 did to quicken the start of combat.

I combined the picking up the weapon while standing up to speed up getting back into combat because it does feel terrible to have to stand up, pick up your weapon or gear, and then use actions to use it.

PF2 takes some getting used to for the players, especially if coming from 5E or PF1 where the players have a lot of power. But it is loads easier to DM and once your players learn how the mechanics work, they can build more capable characters that can shift the action economy in their favor and learn to control bosses.

As far as just “roleplaying instead of roll play,” what is fun to role play really changes from table to table, and some players don’t have the training in the skills that their characters would have in handling other types of encounters, just like almost no players have the combat training skills to role play combat, so they mostly rely on dice rolls and descriptions within the rule book to narrate what happens.

This very often results in one or two charismatic players handling all of the “roleplay” encounters while other players just sit quietly and watch, or get forced into interacting in ways that end up complicating g everything for the whole party. There is definitely a reason newer APs include a lot more subsystems for out of combat encounters than they used to, and they continue to do it because they get good feedback about it.

At the same time, the skill feats system was something pretty new, that didn’t get play tested in nearly the same robust way as the combat system, with the exception of skill feats that play over into combat. I don’t remember the playtest really pushing things like the influence system or the research system, and if it did include any of that, it was pretty one off compared to the number of combat encounters. It makes sense that the development of combat came first, but now, between PF2 and SF2 there is room for a lot of growth in making these non-combat encounters more dynamic and fun, and less worthy of just skipping with a single dice roll.

These games used to encourage and teach role-playing. It was a chance to play some character and not be yourself for a while. A chance to think and develop some social skills by stepping outside of yourself in an environment with a bunch of other odd folks that like a strange niche hobby that enjoyed this type of interaction. To reduce it all to rolls in a game full of rolls takes away the RP in the RPG.

Why not let a game engine do it all in a video game or play a board game where it is all rolls?

I know plenty of folks start off not enjoying the role-play part. I've always been the kind of DM that coaxes role-playing out of people that might not usually do it. I don't expect Oscar winning acting or anything, but some thought put into who that character is and what they would do in a given situation. Then I coax out the role-play.

I've always found it enjoyable when someone who is shy or socially awkward steps out of their comfort zone in an environment of friends where they know they won't be ridiculed or attacked to at least try to do some role-play character development. I work to make it fun for them.

A big part of the joy of this odd hobby is that it isn't a simple game of rolling dice, but a fantasy game that let's you inhabit a character that you will never be in real life in a story like what you've read in books or seen in movies. You get to be that heroic or anti-hero character and interact with a world that feels real. I don't how real a world feels if it all devolves into rolling.

The game is flexible. I get it. Some groups just want to roll and move on to combat. I don't enjoy that type of game. The analytical part of my brain enjoys building strong characters using the rules. The artistic part would not enjoy these games if it is was all combat. I'd stick with video games or board games. I have to have that narrative element with players that want to play characters and develop the imagination and be part of a fantasy story.

I feel too much codification of non-combat elements leads to too much rolling replacing role-playing and narrative elements. Combat is heavily focused on rules and rolling. If you push non-combat in this direction, you end up rolling for everything.

I much prefer if they started using guidelines that showed GMs how to develop narrative interactions to solve problems rather than rolls. Yo can combine the too as most often do, but a rule asking for a roll should never, ever trump a player coming up with some great RP. To me those are the moments that differentiate an RPG from other types of games.

Unicore wrote:

Thinking more about the modes of play in relationship to all this, I think for PF3, we need to do away with “encounter” mode and just call it “Combat.” Encounters are things that need to be able to happen in all three modes of play at different paces and when encounters become synonymous with combat, it turns all abilities characters have into nails. Combat nails.

I also think that, for a new edition of the game, that skills for use in combat be split off from skill use in other modes. Not necessarily as the skills themselves, like the athletics number could be used for either, but skill feats really need to pick a lane and having something like “talents” for combat skill feats, and skill feats for exploration and down time skill use would eliminate the issue of combat skill feats being inherently better and of having exploration encounters where there is no obvious way to apply a skill feats that should be useful.

I agree on both counts! We already have social encounters in PF2e, but very little to support those, and I agree it would be more helpful to call combat by its actual name and treat non-combat encounters as their own thing, if only so that they can be catered to a bit better. I'm very happy with combat being so fleshed-out, but I'd like other modes to be fleshed out a lot more too, as I think there's a lot of interesting gameplay to be had from tactically deep exploration, travel, and so on.

For this same reason, I'd like any sort of feats and general mechanics to be separated by mode, so that becoming better at combat doesn't mean sacrificing your ability to explore and vice versa. Put together, this would genuinely allow for a much more modular game: if something like travel were a self-contained module that you could plug in and out of your game, along with all of its associated character options, then adding it to a game would allow characters to build around travel on equal footing, and removing it from gameplay wouldn't impact the balance of those...

Those modes of play don't need additional options. Run them narratively. There is depth in roll-play versus roleplay. It leads to a game of too many rolls and too much failure chance when narrative depth would add more to the interactions.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Having an official place to put "pending errata" is exactly how unofficial dev posts no longer have such "rule weight" behind them.

Rephrased: It is *because* we so badly lack proper communication that the players latch on to casual word of dev so strongly. If Paizo were to add better communication channels around rule clarifications, uncertain solo devs making comments would not need to be held up as hard rule fact.

______

Your concerns about Paizo's official ruling contradiction your own table rules is a completely separate and disconnected issue.

In my opinion, everyone should try to get more comfortable modifying the game's rules to their own fancy. No single person should justify the rules being incomplete and contradictory because of their own personal tastes.

That's how we've done it since I started playing RPGs. I'm ok with it.

I was not a fan of 3E/PF1 rules lawyering with players seeking rulings from up on high to try to force DMs to let some insane, broken thing work because the Paizo/D&D devs said that's how it worked. If something is breaking the game or causing issues, then let DMs fix it by leaving it open-ended or fix it in a way that isn't broken.

One thing I will say about PF2 is there aren't many broken things. I think the worst thing most of us can find is Imaginary Weapon with Starlit Span magus. If that's the most broken combo in PF2, that's pretty amazing given how many broken combos, spells, abilities, and the like there were in PF1. PF2 plays pretty well from 1 to 20 and I don't see any class so powerful that it overshadows any other class. Even the boring classes do fine for those that like them.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

A random quote from a designer turning Tumble Through into a stride replacement that doesn't require you Tumble Through and having a certain segment of the player base lock onto it as canon to make a single class work is not great.

The tumble through statement being gelled onto by the community isn’t just because a designer said so. It’s because it was seen as confirmation of what was already the simplest way of running tumble through consistent with the hiding rules, tumble through being a predeclared action (not a reaction to moving through an enemy’s space), and avoiding stuff like readied action stride blocking tumble through.

Tumble through working the way it does was already mainstream before litagurist was even released, that’s why quick spring had to be fixed. A designer quote is just a nail in the coffin of an already stacked deck.

I see it as a ridiculous rules interpretation that I want no part of. Tumble Through isn't and never should be a replacement for Stride. It is a specific action with a specific purpose. I and my group have never, ever played it as a replacement for Stride and knew nothing about Quick Spring rules ridiculousness. My group in general doesn't really like when the use of the rule leads to ridiculous outcomes like Tumble Through and Stride becoming essentially the same and one of them might as well not even exist or have words wasted on them. To me that is when rules writing is bad and I feel the need to fix it, which I have done with Tumble Through so that it is not the same thing as Stride.

That is why I view any attempt at rigid rules lawyering because Paizo has made a rule ridiculous is what I do not want in my game.

Trip.H wrote:

I've been in the newbie position on the bugs team at a company where my early "hold up, that sounds kinda dumb sub optimal, why don't we---" and then got essentially trauma dumped on by my peers who each had previously made their own desperate appeal to the higher ups. The engineering department even had polished & presented a 20+ page document desperately seeking such updates to the company's methodology.

Most bright-eyed hires will have the fire to make one plea / pitch, and if(when) they get quashed, that's it.
After that experience, they will be hesitant to even draw attention to themselves, let alone risk the social capital to advocate for a change.

That's rough. :(

Remember when Maya was new here, saw some of these questions, and said xe would try to get an answer? Notice how there was no answer and that stopped happening?

I felt really bad for Maya in that situation, who was trying to help us out but pretty clearly got told from elsewhere in the company that answering rules questions is not done for some reason.

I would be extremely careful as a company too if my player base would read something posted on discord by a single designer and suddenly that becomes canon for the entire game.

All Maya would have to do to have the player base suddenly posting something as canon is talk to one designer, get some casual answer to a question, post it, and that would suddenly become canon even if it wasn't an official ruling.

I would be very careful about making things canon after what happened in PF1/3E where rules lawyering became a thing that appears to be gone in PF2. I'm happy for it. I want my game to be my game. I don't care what someone else does in their game.

DMs should have the power, not some perfect or official interpretation of the rules.

Paizo insists the wizard is in a fine place and is a popular class. I also don't see wizards played very often, but in PF1 I saw wizards nearly every campaign due to being the most powerful class in the game.

Now wizard's are one of the least played classes. Maybe that is where Paizo wants them this time around as they went from too powerful to a niche class to played by those that like that class fantasy.

Now rogues, fighters, sorcs and clerics are the most played classes. Sorc seems to have replaced the wizard as the go to low hit point caster class in the core 4. No one wants the headache of managing spell lists any longer with it no longer being a worthwhile endeavor since every caster i the same and the spells are shared on multiple lists.

In PF1 having a wizard/sorc spell list with new books bolstering power, managing a spell list was THE reason wizard's were powerful. Now all spells are sort of equally powerful. So just take the same spell and use it over and over again. The sorc is better at doing that, so they seem to have replaced the wizard in PF2. Not to mention charisma is a better stat than intel when it comes to impactful skills and skill feats.

Madhippy3 wrote:

While I respect that there is a lot of fun theory crafting happening, a few of these ideas we would be lucky to get in a 3e as it is to major a change. I am not convinced that making the Wizard more potent is bad merely because it doesn't fit the idea of the versatile wizard, which we acknowledge wasn't everyone's idea of a wizard anyways.

It doesn't really matter about making it wrong as long as we don't make it worse, because the current wizard is the worse it has ever been. It is so bad it created a misconception about the Arcane list that started this thread. This is all a hope dream, but if there is ever going to be a Reremaster of the Wizard that we will see and be able to enjoy in this edition we should theory craft towards simpler changes to the class. So far we have a lot of that.

Unless it would absolutely break the game I am not convinced that letting flexibility be from a huge spell list, swappable spellshapes and spells between combat, and emphasis of spell power through earlier Expert, Master, and Legendary is something to simply dismiss because its not perfect for everyone. It is practical on a printing level and thats what might, with luck, get Paizo to change. Things that already have page space get moved from the feat and thesis side to the class chassis side, and you change Trained to Expert, Expert to Master, Master to Legendary, and delete the redundant Legendary, where you find them related to Spell Modifier. Secondarily Paizo can emphasize more exclusively Arcane spells with new book releases.

While there might be more fixes to add, this is simple and practical. It doesn't matter if it isn't the wizard everyone wants because the wizard we have is the wizard no one wants. We need a buff for the wizard practical enough that someone is going to want to play it and Paizo is willing to print it. Hell my suggestion is so simple it could be done in an errata.

You're overstating it quite a bit here. The wizard like all casters in this game has a solid...

The power is fine. It's in line with all other features.

Yep. Spell Substitution should be a class feature like the wizard version of Sorcerous Potency.

I would like to see Curriculums made way more interesting. Get rid of the extra curriculum spell slot and give them 4.

Give the curriculum more interesting focus spells focused on what they're supposed to do well.

Almost every caster I play right now barely ever uses all their slots in a day and I don't even play a wizard. It's not necessary. Spell slots might stand out in a really long fight, but even them a magic item or good focus spell would be equally useful.

I think they would have been fine if they had just tossed out the idea of the PF1 wizard and built the wizard like it was made for PF2.

To me it felt like the designers didn't understand why the wizard was so good as the wizard was great less due to class features which very few people cared about other than maybe the divination initiative bonus.

The 3E/PF1 wizard was so great for the following systemic reasons:

1. Best spell list in the game and it wasn't even close. Every major buff, debuff, damage, utility, and etcetera spell. It had everything but healing for the most part and you could access healing with limited wish and wish.

2. Metamagic was amazing. Prepared casting or certain feats allowed very efficient use of metamagic.

3. Access to amazing feats that boosted DC and allowed you to turn a few spells into spontaneous.

4. Huge number of slots.

5. Slots were flexible and could be kept empty throughout day.

6. Intelligence based skills were the main way to recall knowledge and were a free action to use. They knew everything.

7. Skill points went off intelligence. Intelligence was a highly valuable stat because of how it impacted skills.

8. Crafting and magic items was amazing. Wizards got free feats for crafting items as well as metamagic. They had every spell when the spells you could access mattered for crafting magic items.

When you try to build the wizard class like it was in PF1, then rip apart every systemic advantage that made the wizard what it was you're setting yourself up for a big fail.

The reason the wizard feels bad is the base class is built like the PF1 wizard which would have been an equally unattractive class in PF1 if all the systemic advantages they had were removed like they were in PF2.

The PF1 wizard would have been a terrible class if it hadn't had so many built in system advantages in PF1. The designers didn't quite seem to grasp how important these system advantages were to the power and attractiveness of the wizard class.

Thus they should have thrown out the PF1 wizard template as it had very little to do with drawing people to the wizard class and remade the wizard with PF2 in mind. More focus on a few really potent class abilities mixed with high quality focus spells versus ripping the system down then expecting things like school specialization to be anything anyone wanted by making a spell slot dependent on school when all the reasons that was worthwhile are gone. They are even more gone in PF2 Remastered with the schools removed and the spell choices so narrow.

I just feel the designers need to let someone have a go at a PF2 wizard that is completely free form any association with the old one at this point. There's nothing that looks great there any more other than the name.

With so few spell slots, the number of spells is overkill. It was ok to have huge spell lists in PF1 when you had 6 or more slots for every spell level, cheap scrolls, items, and the like, but with so few spell slots you don't need that many spells. You won't be able to use many of them.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Spells all compete against each other for a slot based on what they do. So a combat summon should be able to equal the damage of a similar level spell in a combat. Since direct damage in PF2 does pretty nutty damage, very hard for a spell to compete.

To zoom in on that bit:

The summon spell needs to "in the average case" have a total impact that matches other spells. You have to add together the summon's damage, the damage reduction (by getting hit), the action-stealing (by being swung at), and even the battlefield manipulation (by being a token occupying space).

This is what I mean when I say that summon spells are dangerously powerful.
It's pretty easy to see that a summon spell that eats a foe's Stride + Strike, does 1/4 the dmg of an on-R spell, and stops a foe from flanking, can quickly add up in terms of power.

And considering the HP growth math, I do think at higher level, summons noticeably shift away from dealing damage and into more of a tank/obstruction utility role.
If a player's summon is killed via targeted damage at any level, that basically means that the spell was wildly powerful, and this is all the more true at high level.
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A quick note on over time & sustain spells.
Some dev-set duration would be seen as the break-even point of power returns for the investment of casting. Any shorter, and the spell is intended to provide inferior returns, and any longer results in a "stronger than other spells, on purpose" effect.

Sometimes you can calculate this break even duration when it comes to more simple "just do damage" spells, but even when summon spells make that comparison kinda impossible, it still does affect the considerations for summon spells.

As someone that spends a lot of time playing at higher levels, I can say that combat summons become progressively worse. I've used summons in the 1 to 7 to 10 range and they do what you say they do. They can be a nice little roadblock that maybe does a bit of damage. They aren't too bad. I've used them for a variety of purposes at lower levels.

But once you push to that 11 and up range and especially after 13 to 15, the attack rolls, passive ability saves, ability to use reach, AOE damage, and the like makes summons pretty useless. They critically miss or miss their saves against passives like auras and gazes nearly upon summoning which can be quite bad. They can barely land a blow. They get crit on nearly every hit from the enemy. The save effects on their passives or spells is so low that an enemy shrugs it off. Those big fat hit point pools that make you think they can take a hit getting crushed by crits and high damage enemy abilities. All in all I stop using summons unless like a muse azata or some spell user past level 13. No way I'm spending a level 7 or higher slot that I can will with some amazing hammer spell for a summon that is going to critically fail an aura, gaze, or special ability effect and be rendered useless almost as soon as I use the spell.

The level gap is too wide at high level. The tiered system they used where you're summoning some level-3, 4, or 5 creature at level 13 and up with a level 7 or higher spell is too painfully low to be worth using for combat.

Since a summon can stick around for a full minute, its round-to-round abilities have to be diluted compared to an unsustained spell. You might be able to have higher-powered summons with less issue if you had to constantly feed them spell slots.

Spells all compete against each other for a slot based on what they do. So a combat summon should be able to equal the damage of a similar level spell in a combat. Since direct damage in PF2 does pretty nutty damage, very hard for a spell to compete.

Even if the spell lasts a minute, the fight likely won't last a minute. So you have to build these spells to do enough damage or effect to equal the spells they compete against with the span of a combat.

I don't envy the Paizo designers having to thread that needle. I will say for the moment summons spells for combat are hitting on the too weak to compete against another spell slot as the levels up. Need to be up tunned some until we get a sweet spot for effectiveness.

Not only do they need to be tuned higher for regular casters to compete with other slots, they really need to be tuned up to make the summoner summon creature option and feats a lot more viable. With summons as weak as they are for combat, the summoner using summons is an absolutely terrible option becoming more terrible the higher level you get. No class should become weaker as you gain levels, but summons spells become far, far weaker as the levels rise due to the way the level based math works.