MartiniPhilosopher's page

I don't think it will be a dump stat given they're actively finding other uses for it. e.g. Focus and probably unannounced changes.

However, every character needs a dump stat, or two, if we're being honest.

For instance, the Wild Shape druid needs Strength, Charisma, and Wisdom. If you're going to go down the Paizo iconic path and choose a Gnome, that means you're already in the hole w.r.t to Strength. Constitution might be a good choice since you get a boost there but if using the standard set, you're also losing HP. Not a great starting situation.

This is where I think the devs could spend some more time on. Not every stat needs to be useful to every character. Could usefulness be spread around some? Certainly. But not to the point where characters are gimped by not having a score of ten or more.

Agreed.

However, I'll go a bit further than you and say that the whole scheme needs to be tossed. Get rid of the endless modifiers. Get rid of the easy/medium/hard/etc levels. Skills and checks need to be streamlined and simplified, not made more complicated.

These things are meant to help adjudicate situations in the game, not become the game themselves.

I really think lots of folks are taking away bad impressions of the system based off the PT rules because the Test requires that DD be essentially a standardized test with little/no room for creative problem solving or even balanced encounters.

The sweet spot for PF has always been allowing groups to use the rules to play their own thing on their own terms, that and providing QUALITY Adventure Paths, neither of these things are currently applicable to PF2 and I fear there are many players who just don't have the temperament or patience for trying new rules only to throw them out a few weeks later.

Here's the thing.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

That's Paizo biggest problem from here on out. They got their chance to make that first impression and this is what they got out of it. A bunch of people who were fans of their first product really not liking their follow up. People who don't feel like their feedback is being listened to, who aren't enjoying the product, and feel like the development is being railroaded to a predetermined end.

This is a serious, long term problem. Because what happens next is that said product is release and those who are just hearing about are going to go looking for reviews and feedback. And this is what they're going to find. Those same posts describing the not-fun times of play. Which is going to put some crimps on sales going forward.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

This is the same problem that a lot of game developers are facing these days. Extended "early access" or Kickstarter beta previews are hurting release sales. You don't have to go far to find examples. One I'm all too familiar with is Bard's Tale 4. They had an beta and alpha open to backers while also selling said access during development. You can head over to their Steam store page and find out that the devs didn't pay attention to any of the flaws and bugs brought up during all that supposed testing the paying public was doing for them. And so that game sits and will continue to sit in mixed reviews for the rest of its life.

Any plans InExile may have had about resurrecting the brand or funding an expansion of their studio has to be rethought if not abandoned. They'll be lucky to get sales going forward. It doesn't really matter if they do fix everything and make it look good.

Because that first impression is critical. It sets the mood, the feel for your game in the market.

Paizo needs to get their head turned around before it happens to them.

This definitely feels like a step in the right direction. Now that Half-Orcs and Half-Elves can get a proper ancestry feat at 1st level, should things like Orc Sight be available at level 1 instead of level 5? It still feels weird that a Half-Orc has to "grow into" their darkvision.

You know, I'm not playing golden age Clark Kent. Having to "grow into" a racial ability is backwards. Nor are we playing butterflies (unless that's also going to be a new base race) so it's not like children go through a pupa/metamorphosis phase in life to excuse why some have it and some don't.

I get that they want people to play custom but species don't vary that much in actual nature. Nor is it comparable to things like color blindness which effects a tiny portion of people. This is adding too much to character creation and I don't see it paying the dividends in game that the designers want it to.

It needs to be the simpler way it was before. If you're a this, then you get all these things. The end. On to the next part of the min-maxing battle.

"A hard skill DC, the most common in the game, represents something that an average commoner might not try but that adventurers attempt frequently."

Does no one else see anything wrong with this conception of what your average skill check should be? Seriously?

Average while not the mean of something still should be around the middle of the curve, no matter how you've decided to set the probability of it. Therefore, "hard" is not average. Not even remotely. It is above average.

Also, the chart still bad in terms of making it easy. Stop trying to make people look s!*% up or have to glance at in a GM screen. Make it easy to remember. Start it with a number most people are going to think of for a level 1 "easy" skill check. 5 works incredibly well in this instance. That way each level you go up it can be increased by an increment, which would have the effect of something that can be calculated on the fly instead of being looked up.

Same goes for the <redacted> difficulty adjustment. Right now each jump reads as follows: For levels 0 thru 4 inclusive: +5, +2, +1, +2. For levels 5 & 6: +6, +2, +2, +1. And it goes no. There isn't any set pattern.

Set it to a pattern and forget it. That's all you need to do. Stop with this difficulty as a guessing game nonsense. It benefits no one playing. It gets in the way of play.

On the one hand, I get what they're trying to go for. To make skills worth investing in. The classic, the more you know, the better you are at doing stuff. Sure you can still fail but on the whole investing in a skill should me you know the common things to avoid that failure.

On the other than as both a player and a GM, combat damage can swing too wild, too often. And on top of those wild swings you now are in a position of making the player, _the player_, be the one who fails to defend and determine that they're responsible for receiving double damage on their.

That isn't a good idea.

Having a unified conflict resolution mechanic is nice but this sort of thing is great for skill and pretty dumb to apply to combat.

Fix combat damage's wild swings and then we can talk about this.