Cabbagehead

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Very tempting!

If Ameiko Kaijitsu bought the Rusty Dragon for the prestige or the free drinks, but is getting a bit bored with it, her younger brother Fuyuki (CG Male Human Blacksmith (Iron Chef)) is all in on it - he always wanted to be a chef and bartender, and putting in work for his sister allows him to fulfill that dream. He's particularly interested in fusion cuisine - Tian and Varisian, obviously, but foreigners can almost always get a free meal at the Dragon if they'll tell Fuyuki about the cuisines of their homeland. Lately, he's gotten interested in what was under his nose this whole time - goblin cuisine! He knows relations aren't that great between the human and goblin populations in the area, but maybe that's nothing that frog on a stick served in a nice Varisian jerk blend and some Minkai sesame oil can't solve.

(Full stats if I decide I can commit the time, but probably not too different from a human version of this pregen, focusing on support with a bit of melee.)


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The whelmingness of this, like a lot else, feels like depends on the "animal call":"immunity to scrying" quotient of skill feats. Certainly curious to see what those look like in practice.


T3 is a good area to shoot for and with active editing and 3PP support you can represent almost any character concept there in PF1. Dunno how long it will take for that to be the case in PF2 - core-only PF1 is about the nadir of imbalance issues, even considering how caster flexibility expands with each spell printed.

One positive possibility, with the new skills system, is that even if they get the Fighter wrong, fixing it might be a little easier in practice - maybe you just need to houserule in early access to Athletics/Heal/Intimidate mastery/legendarity, rather than invent entirely new systems.


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Simulationist kitchen sink fantasy, with the (free, searcheable, gargantuan) d20pfsrd.


I've enjoyed and continued to enjoy other systems, but sometimes I'm in the mood for simulationist dungeons-and-taverns fantasy with tons of free support and player familiarity. And I've also had plenty of great roleplaying experiences within that, just as much as other games.

(D&D definitely has been more combat-focused than other games, and it would be silly to expect PF2 to not be a part of that tradition, but I don't know that it makes sense to blame the war gaming legacy. Barring the 4e => 5e transition, the secular trend has been for the game to get more focused on combat over time. OD&D is a game about stealing treasure, where combat is high risk, low reward, and tactically shallow - the strategic challennge is in avoiding it. From then on you having a progressive erosion of all these qualities as you get CR guidelines, XP for combat rather than treasure, and more and more combat options. The result is that both OD&D and 4e are very tight, focused games with a very coherent vision of what they're about, while other editions are a bit more "coherent" in Forge terms - which doesn't mean worse, since they're also more flexible IMO.)


I think bumping spells up a level is a good idea, but also that the sensible place to do that is by probably by puffing out 2-3-4 into 2-3-4-5. Wizards at the lowest levels can probably use some buffing, especially in combat; it would be nice if, as in 4e, they had multiple tactically distinct cantrips they started out with. (I'm playing a 1st level wizard in a 5e game right now, and it's kind of lame how often I just throw ray of frost around. Though I guess this is another one of those situations where the worst thing for a caster is having to deal with what martials have to put up with the whole game.)


At a table, some people are just being social, whereas on PBP, people actively want to participate in the game/story qua game/story, so the "just let the fighter sit back (and joke/eat snacks) outside of combat" social contract might work for some live tables but few online ones. Possibly this also accounts for the popularity of gestalt in PBP.


Jason Buhlman suggested that this topic would best be addressed in a thread outside the fighter one, so here is a thread.

As I understand it, the situation roughly is:

1) The designers seem to have acknowledged this as a design goal.
2) Skills, and by extension martial, will be allowed to be more epic than before, although we don't have a lot of details.
3) We know very little about when any given spell comes online, or indeed much else about how magic operates, although it's probably fair to assume full casters gain a new spell level every other character level.
4) Fighters do not appear to get any non-combat abilities for being fighters aside from fast-tracked perception, although they do benefit from the same skill consolidation and empowerment that everyone else does (and presumably benefit more, in the same way that a poor person benefits more from a UBI and generous public services than a rich person does, even though they get the same check in the mail, the same bus to ride on, and so on.)

Obligatory link.


Ikos wrote:
I like what we've seen here and believe that our 2e fighter will be much more interesting to play and tactically flexible than his predecessor. My hope is that this new and improved fighter either has a few substantive tricks yet revealed, or (if we're looking at the meat and potatoes), other class abilities have been designed with this class as a "foundational" benchmark. One of the largest problems with the 1e model was that so many martial-based alternatives outperformed the fighter, with the added benefit of those alternatives being more enjoyable to play. Providing fighters abilities comparable to those possessed by their peers might be just the types of incentives required to our base fighter into a more precious (even invaluable) class.

I'm all for making the fighter as fun as possible, but - and this is a more general point - I hope that any mistakes made in the design of the core classes (and in a game as complex as these, this is inevitable) don't get baked in as benchmarks that hold back lessons learned since then. PF1 is a better game than it would otherwise have been for later martial characters being funner and stronger than the fighter baseline, and even better when you bring in 3PP materials that drop that benchmark entirely. Ultimately the job is to be fair to fundamental fantasy character concepts like the mercenary captain or knight, not to the fighter class as such, which is just a vehicle for representing those.


Abstracting from the issue of what's appropriate to what level (and whether fighters are able to keep up with the options provided to other classes, and so on) I do think level is good prerequisite. The main alternatives are to gate behind more specific prerequisites, which (especially when they proliferate) encourages highly-planned-out characters who are trying to reach benchmarks on schedule rather than develop organically, and dropping prerequisites entirely, which removes a useful tool for getting abilities that scale or balance against each others. (There's also having feats scale with your level, which I think is also good, but which doesn't make sense for all concepts.)


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Tarik Blackhands wrote:

I mean, beyond the fact that Paizo acknowledged in the opening blog post that CM/D existed and was a problem (compared to the prior line of "doesn't exist, move along"). This preview gave out and implied a bunch of fighter exclusive stunts/abilities someone might want compared to playing something else.

Now if it later comes out in, I dunno, the Barbarian preview that Barbs can get their +4 rage bonus to all saves at L10 then sure, you can rightfully call the shield ability comparatively garbage but comparing stuff to PF1 are pretty pointless comparisons if you ask me.

In-combat numbers have never been the fighter's problem. She deals damage, she takes damage; her ability to do anything else - in a game where, say, 4th level wizard skills include Remove Curse, Dimension Door, Secure Shelter, Scrying, Charm Monster, Lesser Geas, Greater Invisibility, Animate Dead, and Stone Shape, among plenty of things that are (also) useful in combat - is the issue. Of course we haven't seen yet what skills are capable of now, or spells, but that's the crux of the issue, not, fundamentally, some extra points to an attack or damage or reflex role.


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Zaister wrote:
I'm also wondering, what is this "narrative power" you want the fighter to have? What kind of abilities are you imagining there?

I think the faster access to higher Perception proficiencies is a good start, and could easily be extended to Athletics, Intimidate, and Heal, or whatever their equivalents are.

Logistics! Setting up a bivouac, increasing the party's collective bulk capacity and/or overland speed with their knowledge of proper procedure. Lowering the chances of a wandering monster encounter through knowledge of where enemies are likely to set up an ambush.

Crafting arms and armor.

Bonus ancestry and/or skill feats.

Building a fortress and attracting 10d6 fighting men. Stuff that slots into whatever kingdom management minigame we have this edition. Generalship!


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Am I correct in reading that just about everything Fighter-specific has to do with, well, fighting*, and that any out-of-combat capabilities they have are those granted by skill proficiencies and feats? (I do see battlefield surveyor as an exception to this, which was nice.) That's always been the most limiting aspect of the class. How does their skill progression compare to other classes?

*Yes, the name points to this, but I don't think the fictional examples do.


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This goes back to a lot riding on how task difficulty is assigned on both the DC and minimum proficiency axes, but plausibly there are plenty of situations where the city watch could still make trouble for you because the relevant problems are proficiency-gated.

So the +level bonus might make trivial sneaking past the city guards in a dark alley, or outrunning them, or bribing them away from a minor crime when the chance of discovery is low, or pick soneone's pocket without their noticing, and so on. But simply confidently walking past them into an area you're not supposed to be in broad daylight, or knowing how to clean up evidence after a crime scene, or convincing them to follow your orders because of a preposterous lie like "actually, I'm the captain of the city watch, just undercover and polymorphed" might require various levels of proficiency, even if your opponents in these matters are ordinary guards.


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Dave2 wrote:
No one has seemed to mention that in PF1 that a 20th level Wizard has a BAB 10/5. This means that without ever picking up a sword they clearly out class a 5th level fighter who has trained with their weapon extensively. If you have a problem with PF2 proficiencies why is the above example ok in PF1? Even with the -4 penalty for not being proficient the are still at 6/1. So picking up the very unwieldy great sword for the first time, they are still better than the 5th level fighter who has trained with the great sword their whole career. Seems like same issue to me.

I wouldn't presume that people who dislike automatic progression in skills do like automatic progression in BAB/hp/&c., necessarily.

(By way of analogy, someone concerned that the Resonance system would increase the need for dedicated healers certainly doesn't necessarily like that monsters start conferring certain kinds of permanent status effects roughly in line with when clerics get them, something that leans in the direction of necessary dedicated healers in PF1.)


Blackwaltzomega wrote:
You seem to be absolutely refusing to accept the idea that there could be a game where having a bigger number doesn't mean you're better at something than the person who has more capabilities than you at the task.

A terminological suggestion for the thread, for which I don't mean to single you out in particular: both proficiency and and net-bonus-to-roll (and their counterparts for any given action, minimum proficiency and DC) are numeric in nature. One is much more granular, but using "number" to refer to only one of them is liable to get confusing.


I am curious about a lot of the information missing here - mainly, how different tasks are placed along the DC vs. proficiency minimum axes. Are the axes tightly correlated? How generous are they with trained status, and how much is locked behind it? Will I be able to remember which tasks require mastery vs mere expertise? How will the extraordinary application of skills keep pace with spells? How consistent do all these feel across skills?

I feel like almost all of the concerns raised here could be no big deal at all or crippling depending on how these are implemented. I'd love to see an example chart of, say, Thievery (or whatever they decide to call it) tasks organized by DC and proficiency minima.


1) Eldritch Scoundrel. I'd make it a core class (with the Bard as an archetype) if I could.
2) Eldritch Scion. Fills in another fundamental concept.
3) Tortured Crusader. A lot to like about this one, mostly mentioned above.
4) Oozemorph. The implementation of the Shifter, obviously, left a lot to be desired, as did the implementation of the Oozemorph itself. The concept, however, is solid (well, oozy) gold. Make it its own class if that's what you need to do it justice.
5) Bladebound. I guess I don't need an archetype to roleplay a guy and his creepy magic sword best friend, but I guess I wouldn't refuse an archetype to go along with it, either.

What I've really been hoping for since I heard that archetypes weren't class-specific, though, is a chance to add major class features to any other class - all of the major spellcasting varieties plus shapeshifting would be at the top of that list for me.

edit, since I can't read: Sacred Servant paladin (both for the power boost and the additional axis of variation), Cloistered Cleric, Lore Warden, though I think of all of those as directions I'd like to see those classes move in in general, rather than especially specific concepts, so I don't know if those are appropriate answers either


John Lynch 106 wrote:
Shinigami02 wrote:
As long as it remains possible for skills like Stealth or the movement skills (Climb, Swim, basically stuff that's in Athletics now I think) to be relevant without either the entire party having to invest in it (particularly bad with Stealth) or suicidally splitting the party and going alone, I would be okay. As is, PF1e makes Stealth virtually useless as a skill most of the time.

Master Trainer (Skill Feat)

Prerequisite: Master Rank
Benefit: Select one skill you have master rank in. By first spending 10 minutes you can give everyone your bonus in that skill so long as they perform the activity with you. This bonus ceases after either 1 hour or when they stop performing the activity with you (whichever happens later).

There we go. My agency of being able to be bad at a skill (except when working with a master) is kept in tact. And you get to be so awesome that even untrained people can be passable just by being in your presence. How is that not cool and help show just how good you are at a particular skill?

Better yet, since this would be a core math assumption rather than a unique character trick, bake this in (with scaling, &c.) into the aid another action.

(Yes, I'm aware of the irony of preserving choices not to be capable of things by forcing them to be capable of another thing. I also support laws requiring all citizens to show up to the polls. :P)


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I would actually extend the same thoughts to how CR is presented. Phrasing an encounter that eats up 20% of a party's resources (or whatever) as an "appropriate" encounter leads to assumptions of a pretty tight band of CRs that a party of any level faces. Straightforwardly giving estimates of (depending on how the math works out) what kind of attrition or TPK potential different encounters are likely to represent, with advice about pacing and also some nice random encounter tables that explicitly don't care about fair fights would be ideal to my mind.


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Yeah, I was already on board with bespoke NPC generation rules because it would just be less of a headache, but it interfaces with this to make it feel more right. Part of my intuitions were informed by a sense that, even if I got to be very good at the things I want to be good at, there'd always be plenty of things I'm worse than the average person at. But "adventurers" naturally have to acquire a very broad skill set, and this fits with genre expectations in a lot of ways. (Conan isn't a specialized smashing machine, he's incredibly broadly competent, and the same applies to Gandalf and so on.)


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Thanks for the replies to my 8 cha vs 18 cha fighter question, I think many of them are reasonable. I guess I'm less bothered by any particular example than by the idea that a higher-level character (and not just 1 vs. 20, but any n vs. n+5) is better at every raw task than any lower-level character is areas where neither has specialized. Like, I think if you took people who were extremely good at some things, say Master level in the terms above, for each of those people there would be plenty of high schoolers who could beat them in unrelated tasks.

I guess I don't have a deeply principled objection beyond "the aggregate numbers seem off to me," because I'm totally on board with 1) practice beating talent, and 2) adventuring experience conferring broadly-based practice even in things you're not consciously investing in. It just seems like generalized experience accumulates so quickly and universally. Since I don't have any principled reason to prefer something like 1/2 automatic progression over 1:1 other than my intuition, maybe I should just accept that the math worked out better for the latter in internal playtesting, and I should wait and see until I get to see the actual full rules and play them. (Though this of course applies to everything.)


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Another area where the numbers "feel off" to me: the ability score vs. level contribution to bonuses, between different untrained characters, even at nondramatic level differences.

Say there's a level 6, Charisma 18 fighter and a level 12, Charisma 8 fighter. How would you roleplay these characters? All else being equal, I'd play the 18 Cha fighter as a lot more socially confident, with better intuitions, better at producing the reactions she wants to get out of people, and overall someone you want the approval of. The first fighter would be one of the most popular people you knew, while the second would tend to be very socially awkward. But if they go out to haggle over the price of goods, or to the tavern to pick up dates, or try to cheer up a friend - all of which are just normal activities that can benefit from specific skills, but don't require them - then the math says Ugly McAwkwardson is better.


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master_marshmallow wrote:

So, how does proficiency affect things other than skills?

Is it tied to weapon groups? Can I be legendary with swords and use a legendary weapon to get level +6 to hit?

Per the blog post, that's how I'm reading it:

Quote:

You don't just have proficiency in weapons, which helps when you swing a sword, or proficiency in armor, which protects you when you try to avoid a blow—instead, proficiency covers everything from axes to spells, from Acrobatics to Thievery, and from Perception to Will saves...

Other than a few classes like fighters, with their incredible command of weapons, characters can't become masters until level 7 at the earliest, and sometimes much later...

Most characters can't hope to become legendary until level 15 at the earliest, and even the mightiest fighters reach these heights with their weapons only at level 13....

So weapon proficiencies use the same system, and I would be very surprised if the bonuses don't stack with equipment. I think it was mentioned in the discussion of iterative attack penalties that the math works out such that for the first attack a fighter makes each round, the question is generally whether she crits, whereas for the second or third attack it's a question of whether they hit.

I am curious how it will work with spells. Maybe you have proficiency in certain schools of magic, and spells of particular level are gated behind proficiency levels? That would both lessen the (vertical) gap between wizardy types and martials, and widen the (horizontal) gap between different wizards, both of which would be good. But there are probably other ways they could do it as well.


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gustavo iglesias wrote:
John Lynch 106 wrote:
gustavo iglesias wrote:
And why do you oppose the idea that a lvl 20 wizard can endure weather better than a lvl 1 wizard? Not trying to be contentius, just genuine curiosity here.

What skill is that?

Survival.

Obviously I don't know if that particular roll is going to be untrained, or which ones will be, but let's work with the hypothesis that from the things you can do with Survival (shelter, predict weather, track, not getting lost, avoid a hazard, endure weather, etc), an untrained person can just endure weather and avoid getting lost.

Why does it break similitude that the lvl 20 wizard can do better than the lvl 1 wizard the kind of rolls that the lvl 1 wizard can also try? He is still unable to do the lvl 1 ranger's job, because he cannot track, or find food, or construct a shelter. Much less do legendary stuff like surviving radiation, vacuum, or in the plane of fire.

It certainly doesn't break my suspension of disbelief that a legendary adventurer might acquire a great degree of all-around competence. But the rapid rate of advancement by level (1:1) and hard gating of certain tasks behind proficiency levels produces a situation where not only are there two orthogonal but conceptually similar difficulty tracks to keep track of, high level-characters are going to be off in one corner of the two-axis difficulty graph rather than on the diagonal line, so to speak. A +20, which is both the maximum possible variance from dice and the distance between a bare critical success and bare critical failure, is enough that any untrained task doable by an ordinary person will be trivial for this experienced adventurer, and yet they won't even be able to try tasks that have a minimum proficiency. (Tougher skills are often just learning to be really solid on easier ones, is part of the WSOD here.)

And a mere expert won't even be able to try things that require being a master, and so on - do you expect to remember which tasks are DC 30 (minimum expert) and which are DC 25 (minimum master?) And yeah, you certainly don't have to remember perfectly, I never do, but there are going to be more hurt feelings when I accidentally estimate something as a master task vs an expert one, than when I give a DC that's too high.

Of course maybe all of these issues will be more intuitive in the full version, but I don't have a good sense from the preview about how to distinguish them. Maybe they experimented with a single-dimensional system and it didn't work out - I'd be curious to hear about it!


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Harveyopolis wrote:
I'm not a huge fan of the +level to your modifier, but I think an easy fix could be had. Just make the amount your level contributes to your modifier based on your proficiency rank? For examples Trained would grant 1/4 of your level, Expert 1/3, Master 1/2 and then Legendary for the full level which at that point would be a reasonable thing. It makes the proficiency ranks matter a whole lot more, while still keeping more or less the same balance.

I was thinking something similar - you could even be generous with the math so that lots of skills were on a middling track, so that both the skills you were especially bad at and especially good at served as a distinguishing choice. Maybe martial characters have two or three skills advancing at full, six or seven at 3/4, another six or seven at 1/2, and another 5 or six at 1/4; with casters similar but downshifted by 1/4 or something.


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My naive impression, like almost everyone else's, is that the level effect seems overwhelming compared to the proficiency effect. The solution called out for this seems to be making some things just impossible for lower-proficiency characters regardless of level, but then we have two parallel systems for adjudicating the difficulty of an action - minimum proficiency, and also net bonus vs. DC - with no clear conceptual distinction between them. It seems like an unnecessary complication that would certainly be a cognitive load issue for me as GM, especially if every skill has bespoke things that end up with different minimum proficiency levels, although of course I haven't seen it play out in play.

On the positive side, I should say I'm very happy to see the designers embracing the idea that non-casters should be capable of performing amazing deeds (although a lot depends on how quickly Master proficiency comes online, and what it can pull off.) Meager non-magical capabilities out of combat, especially outside the lowest levels, has always been one of the most disappointing aspects of 3e and its spinoffs.


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gbonehead wrote:

Health bars. Mana bars. Resonance.

This is sounding scarily like the whole part of 4E that made me extremely unhappy.

See, I don't like when the game reminds me I'm playing a game. Every time there's some awkward mechanic that exists for no other reason than to fix some gameplay issue, it's like someone comes up and smacks me in the face and says "hey! don't forget you're playing a game!"

It runs entirely counter to me trying to run a game and not ruin the immersion in what's actually happening.

Granted, this is all based on some stuff in a podcast, but it makes me nervous - that was a major problem I had with 4e, and a comment like "we've invented mana bars" doesn't help much :/

Magic is made up, but as far as popular intuitions go, an extremely large portion of fictional portrayals of magic involve something not too far from mana bars - whether it's explicit bars as in video games or just characters saying they're too exhausted to work their magic - and as far as I can tell, none that portray Vancian casting other than D&D and Jack Vance themselves. If it reminds you of a video game that's because it reminds you of almost anything other than D&D.

Vancian casting is pretty unintuitive - both for our intuitions about magic, and more seriously for our intuitions about, like, what it is to remember things - but it does have some pretty neat features in a game about applying lateral thinking to logistics/resource management puzzles, which is what early D&D was. It's at least as gamey as 4e granting Fighters maneuvers they could use once a day, and only more acceptable to the fanbase because (1) again, magic is made up, and (2) we've become familiar with it.


BigDTBone wrote:
I don't understand how you have made that link. In this suggestion it is MORE difficult to make subsequent attacks with larger weapons. As in, (presuming a 6 second round) making an attack, recovering, and repeating inside of 6 seconds would be MORE difficult with a claymore than with a dagger. Which, I think, is accurate from a simulationist stand point (not that I really care about that) but also adds benefit to using smaller weapons which is sorely lacking in the current system.

Attack and move (and seek, or whatever) actions trade off against each other, so a weapon with a rapidly declining marginal utility to additional uses is more likely to take up fewer of your actions, freeing them for other uses. If the second rapier thrust is similar to the first in terms of expected damage output, but a second great maul slam is much less than the first, then it makes more sense for a someone wielding a grand maul to go move-slam-move, say, while the rapier wielder goes move-thrust-thrust, or thrust-thrust-thrust. (Obviously the particular utility of spending your next action on moving vs. attacking vs. something else will (hopefully!) vary a lot from round to round, I'm just looking at the effects on the margin here.)


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TBH, I don't think that "full of stand-ins for familiar Earth cultures," "wide availability of magic as posited by 3.x D&D," and "makes a lot of sense if you think it through" are really compatible setting design goals; you can pick any two, really. Golarion picks the first two, which isn't bad - it's what I'd choose if I wanted something to sell a diverse array of adventure paths for - but if you want to go with another option, that's what the joy of worldbuilding is for, and then it's up to you whether you want to think about how exactly Resonance works, jettison it entirely, &c.


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Regarding the main subject of this thread, the main contributors to C/MD aren't math issues at the margin - although those can matter and should be fine-tuned - so much as the incredible breadth of options that full casters, especially prepared full casters, can bring to the table with even a modicum of lateral thinking, vs. the relatively circumscribed out-of-combat capabilities of martial characters.

(Consider how we don't need to know what any of the numbers are in Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit for the joke to work.)

It looks like the latter might be addressed by class skills (though everything depends on the implementation,) and we haven't seen much about the former yet.


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Friendly Rogue wrote:

There are indeed exceptions all over the place, but these exceptions maintain these general conventions in their philosophy:

- I have not heard of a Charisma-based Cleric archetype so you're going to have to enlighten me on this one.

The Elder Mythos Cultist, who "grasping, secretive, and thoroughly mad, Elder Mythos cultists open their bodies and minds to horrifying realities not meant for the sane as they strive to prepare the world for the eventual return of their alien masters."

This 100% runs against my account upthread of what Wise vs. Charismatic casting means in general, because "opening your body and mind" to supernatural forces and messages is pure receptivity (and does indeed fit with the classic image of the mythos cultist, or at least one of the classic images,[1]) and is more in line with thinking of WIS as just plain old sense. I'm inclined to chalk it up to measurement error, as in the Physicist's Proof That All Odd Number Are Prime[2], but maybe that's cheating.

[1] There's a great essay out there, can't recall where, laying out how the social composition of the evil cults in Lovecraft's mythology - a mix of alienated intellectuals and regarded-as-racially-inferior lower classes - fits the social composition of the political movements Lovecraft most disliked.

[2] "1 is basically prime. 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. 9 isn't prime, hmm. 11 is prime, 13 is prime. Accounting for the likelihood of measurement error (9), we can conclude that probably all odd numbers are prime."


BigDTBone wrote:

Ok, so what if the penalties for the 2nd/3rd attacks were tied to weapon size?

2 handed is -4/-8.
One handed -3/-6.
Light weapons -2/-4.
(Hypothetical new category; compact weapons like dagger, main gauche, brass knuckles, Star knife, etc) -1/-2.
Natural weapons/unarmed strike -0/-1.

It would definitely make the smaller weapons more appealing.

This associates heavier weapons with a more mobile fighting style, and while I'd be down with everyone being more mobile in general, it seems aesthetically off for the association to run that way. (Though that's largely informed by passive media consumption; probably someone with HEMA/SCA experience could speak to how much someone wielding a zweihander vs. a rapier tends to move around.)


4e was deliberately designed around the "sweet spot" of 3e, meaning the levels are less differentiated in feel, but at least they all work. 3.x (including PF1) is really able to pull off a more dramatic "zero to hero to demigod" curve, at least for certain classes, at the expense that everything kind of becomes not entirely workeable as you go into the demigod zone. This might just be something of a fundamental tradeoff that you can't really design around, Im not sure.


Kerrilyn wrote:
I'm sure they're here like everybody else: because 4E was worse. And 5e's over-simplification and lackluster commitment to the OGL makes it unappealing. No PDFs, low competition in online services.

FWIW, although 4e has all the OGL/support issues as 5e and is exponentially harder to find a game for, and my tastes do run a bit more simulationist, I do think its chassis is way more competently designed than 3e's, and it would be a shame if good ideas were rejected because they're seen as too similar to 4e.

Quote:
I think part of the reason why we still have the 3.5 text in the sixth printing is because some of the other books refer to exact pages in the CRB, and they would probably have to add pages to the CRB to fix some of these issues:

Yes, and in particular I think it's worth noting that design gets better over the course of each edition - late 3e was better than early 3e, late 4e was better than early 4e, late Pathfinder is uh a mixed bag but still largely better than core. I suspect PF2 will show a similar curve as people acquire system mastery and design experience, and as collective experience reveals what the issues are and the kinds of technology that exist to solve them.

You probably could have had a smaller edition reset just by altering what counts as core. I'm kind of surprised they didn't go down that route, actually! To go back to the thread title, C/MD issues would be a lot less aggravated with just a different selection of classes, for instance! (Say, slayer, magus, warpriest, inquisitor, alchemist, bard, hunter, or something.)


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Friendly Rogue wrote:
P1e still suffers from the fact that there was never a concrete explanation as to why Charisma is so innately tied to magic, but P2e might be able to break the mold and finally set a distinct explanation instead of keeping things vague.

I think you already pointed to half of the explanation: all of the mental ability scores are tied to magic, because sentient beings are tied to magic; and different ability scores broadly map onto different ways of interfacing with magic that are more or less analogous to how they help you interface with the world generally.

So I would conceptualize wisdom-based casting as not just about reverence or association, but about receptivity - characters high in Wisdom are able to hear the signs and portents louder and brighter, so to speak, for the same reasons they can use Perception and Sense Motive. They feel the presence and will of the spiritual realm, whether that's gods or demons or the beating heart of the natural world as a whole; their dreams might be especially vivid, or they might have a sense for the "theme music" that might be playing in a scene. This doesn't mean every high-Wisdom character is tripping out on mystic visions, any more than every intelligent creature is studying mathematics or magical theorems, but it does explain how it's a route to go down.

Likewise, charisma can measure "force of personality" as, like, an active thing - being very brash and confident - but can also stand in more generally for anything (looks, magnetism, social skill) that makes people want to be on your good side. If the premise of magic is that a lot more of the world than physical people is conscious, then part of this is just charming the world. Charismatic characters might be luckier - not in terms of die rolls, but maybe in terms of being in the right place at the right time, that kind of thing. Self-confidence can obviously play into a lot of this - you walking up and taking the sword out of the stone with the same unselfconscious relaxation with which you'd ask someone out on a date - but part of it may just be that the baseline level of magic that infuses everything and is sort of aware is aware of you and wants you to like it. Doesn't mean that every likeable (or scary and intimidating) person gets superpowers, just like not every aware person gets mystic visions or every smart person studies topology, just that that's a route you can go down.

I think? This is probably not that different from what others are saying, and to the extent there's convergence it probably reflects that we do have a baseline understanding of what's going on, it just hasn't been spelled out yet.


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Try dipping into another class to delay getting 9th-level spells, which are miles better than any class's capstone ability, until 20th level.


kyrt-ryder wrote:

A: no need for a dedicated healer or expectation for one character to bear the burden of being the healing resource.

B: make a dedicated healer build available and obvious in core, and make it very awesome if someone wants that role.

C: make the Heal Skill Damn Good, relatively quick (I use one minute per patient, two for self treatment) and free or very cheap. Every party should desire a medic with the Heal Skill (but the game should be totally playable without one.)

(B), or at least a naive implementation of it, was how we got the 3e cleric: a class that had giant fluorescent THIS IS THE HEALING CLASS signs taped all over it, and had its overall power pushed (deliberately, not just by accident like the wizard) so that someone at the table would suck it up and agree to play the healer.

Result? Healing is still boring, wands are silly but way less hassle than sticking someone with a boring job, and CoDzilla.

There are no doubt other implementations (4e's heal/attack combos might point the way to one), but any are going to have to deal with the fact that no amount of power is going to make dedicated healing fun (for most players,) and any power increase to more fun aspects of a class is just going to get people to focus on those more fun aspects.


Erik Mona wrote:

It's more of a philosophy thing.

A lot of us are completists by nature, and being editors we're also super-focused on organization and categorization.

I think this leads us to frequently cover really big topics from all kinds of different angles, but to not go particularly deep with any of them.

Lots of things to think about when it comes to treatments of Golarion in second edition, but for me, within the context of a single book, the main questions are "how wide is the focus" and "how deeply do we explore the topic."

Right now, as in the case of the Dragon Empires book, the answer is usually REALLY WIDE, ALL-INCLUSIVE, REALLY and NOT PARTICULARLY DEEP.

I am starting to think that might not be the best option in second edition.

I think it might be nice to have a setting book that focuses on the areas of the setting that are (1) most socially and geopolitically entangled with one another and (2) the least theme-parky - that is, southern Avistan plus some areas of northern Garund, possibly plus some areas of Arcadia that are linked into a colonial economy with the former, with some special focus on a few cities like Kintargo and Absalom. This gives you a sort of late medieval Mediterranean/early modern Atlantic world, with an ideologically tinged cold war between different inheritors of the great human empires of the past (and legacy of Aroden more broadly), a major superpower teetering on the edge of collapse and willing to bring down everyone else with it if it comes to it, and so on. All of this is what feels most distinctive and value-added about Golarion, as oppoosed to the parts that seem more like they were added so that you could have Product Identity content that was gothic horror or pulp sci-fantasy or whatever without splitting the market with different settings in the way AD&D did.

Calling these other areas "theme park worlds" and explaining their existence in this way feels mean, which isn't my intention - it makes a lot of sense why you did it this way, and some of the supplements on the more "theme parky" areas of the setting, like Distant Worlds and Rule of Fear, are among my favorites (though remembering that they're set in the same universe is kind of like reading early Sandman issues and being reminded that Sandman exists in the same world as the Justice League.) But I do think Southern Avistan and some of the regions connected with it are, by far, the best places to go in depth to lay out in one book a setting that's feels cohesive, interconnected, and distinct.

(The only major disadvantage of this that I can think of is that to get full value out of it you'd probably have to pick and run with fairly specific outcomes to Hell's Rebels, Hell's Vengeance, and War for the Crown that may not match with what particular tables did.)

GreyWolfLord wrote:
Maybe (yes, I think I may be one of those who bought both of them), but what I WOULD like would be something that updates us all on the official changes in the world since the original Inner Sea Guide (or, if you include that in the core rule book that would be AWESOME).

Insofar as the CRB is prime real estate, I'd rather not universal content get pushed out by Golarion-specific stuff.


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I'm not bothered from a simulation perspective, because magic is made up. (You can declare that zone of truth works however you like - it's how societies in the game world respond to its availability that I'm going to question.) Maybe magic just likes people who are likeable; that's certainly how sorcery and UMD work. But I am concerned about how this exacerbates the 15-minute adventuring day and the need for (historically unfun, historically overpowered) dedicated healers. Perhaps they've solved those issues so thoroughly that this won't be a problem, but it seems like this is addressing smaller issues at the expense of aggravating ones that were already worse.


I do think it's worth distinguishing between rules problems (or preferences) that are relatively easy to drop and those that require more effort.

The solution to "I don't like alignment" is to ignore it. The solution to "XP tracking is too much bookkeeping" is to use milestone leveling. Easy!

The solution to "characters' ability to solve problems out of combat is directly proportional to how magicy they are, and everyone in my group wants some balance on this front, but some of them want to play very magicy characters and some of them want to play very nonmagicy characters" is "use SoP/SoM/PoW," which required third party presses with a decade or more or rules mastery and experimentation to come up with completely different subsystems. It's not a great deal of effort now, as long as your table isn't allergic to 3PP, but it is precisely the thing that required somebody's effort to fix.

(A lot of the inevitable "trap" options probably fall into this bucket: as the community collectively learns, people will build guides so that enfranchised players know what the traps are. I don't build my characters for complete optimization, and indeed am very happy to take suboptimal choices for flavor, but I wouldn't dream of making a PF character without a class guide, just because of how easy it is to make a nonfunctional character.)

Or the original Truenamers: cool idea! By RAW, simply doesn't work. Nontrivial to fix.


I'm not invested deeply in any particular implementation, but I'd like to see the need for dedicated healers deemphasized, as (1) that's a generally unfun role to play, (2) trying to balance out an unfun role by making it more powerful in other areas had... less than great results when 3e was designed, such that its offshoots have been suffering ever since, and (3) more flexibility in party composition is better.

So you probably want to spread healing around. Giving everyone a hp reserve (as in 4e or 5e), having more classes that have healing access but don't have it as their main schtick, and letting the Heal skill do more (maybe with skill feats) would all be good, and the last would also go towards giving martials more things out of combat. I might also be inclined to say that short rests just let you go up to 50% (or something) of your hp.

The resonance system, on its own, seems to make the situation worse - "spam wands of CLW" is goofy in a peasant-railgun way but a lesser evil than "every party needs a cleric" - but to be fair we don't know enough about the entire rules ecology to really make a judgment.


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Love me some mid-casters who combine specialized magic with other skills, and the relative dearth of them is definitely one of the things that's disappointing about them sticking with the core class list. (Though hard to say a lot without knowing the implementation.)

As far as terminology, for fighter/wizard hybrids specifically, I like "spellsword" (or something similar) more than "magus," since the latter tells someone that the class is magical without telling them much else, whereas the former tells them pretty much the whole concept. (Out of context, when reading a novel say, I'd assume "magus" means "wizard" means "sorcerer.") "Eldritch knight" sounds a little conceptually narrower than "spellsword" but is still clear about what it is. Even if it were OGL-compatible, "gish" is completely meaningless to anyone who isn't highly enfranchised.


Mark Seifter wrote:
It's not really that similar, and it also doesn't have that "ignore your race and apply these preselected stats wherever you want" option that Starfinder does, so assuming kobolds kept their -4 Strength penalty like in PF1 (they aren't a PC race right now), they would be incapable of reaching the max Strength of other races. On the other hand, not every branch of an ancestry is exactly the same (as seen by humans with their flexible ability scores in PF1, though weirdly mostly only humankin PF1 races had that flexibility), and we let you customize your ancestry a bit more than ever before in that regard. So if you were a member of a tribe of burlier kobolds who were stronger than typical kobolds, you could at least be a little closer to everyone else.

13th Age has you get an ability score bonus from your class, and then a choice of ability score bonuses from your race, but you can't select the same ability score for each. (Like, being an elf grants you +2 Int or +2 Dex, and being a wizard grants you +2 Int or +2 Con, and so an elven wizard can take +2 Int, +2 Con or +2 Int, +2 Dex - IIRC, no guarantees that those are the actual stats.) Any sense of how similar PF2 is to this in practice?


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the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:
Matthias W wrote:
Oftentimes this involves pretty arbitrary decisions, esp. re: the Law-Chaos axis because nobody can agree on what that's supposed to represent, but the nice thing is it doesn't matter and I can just focus on what my character thinks and wants and believes.
If I get people who are unclear on Law and Chaos, I point them at V for Vendetta (the graphic novel, not the film) and The Complete Judge Dredd Casefiles volume 5, and that tends to, if not resolve everything, at least get us close enough to talk the rest of it out.

This is a bit like saying "to get a clear sense of Good and Evil, read Lord of the Rings," or "to get a clear sense of the left-right political spectrum, look at World War II," or "to get a clear sense of masculinity and femininity in American culture, watch {movie}." It's not that these statements are inaccurate in some sense, it's that they aren't especially helpful in terms of classification of less ambiguous cases, or in isolating which features are essential vs. accidental to the concept, and so on.

Like. if you asked me to describe you a character who was highly feminine, and wouldn't be recognized (by a middle-class American, or whatever) as anything else, that would be very easy to do! If I was supposed to classify whether any given character was feminine, masculine, or not that would be a very different task. So would be reasoning "well, this character is masculine on balance, so..." and so on.


Ultrace wrote:
Matthias W wrote:
An elegant way to roll ability modifiers directly is to roll Xd6, where X is what a character's bonuses add up to. Each die landing 1 adds to Str, each landing 2 to Dex, and so on. Roll a set of d6 of two different colors in order to incorporate penalties as well, each green die adding a point from the appropriate score and each red die removing one.
This is an interesting methodology. Did you come up with it or is there someplace else I can read more about it? I like the idea, but would want to get more information on the balancing of dice, number of bonuses, etc.

This is a good question and I actually can't recall whether I stole it from somewhere or invented it independently! (I'm super dumb so probably the former.)

As for best practices, elite array adds up to +6 / -1, so without delving into any real math about expected overlap, 8 green and 3 red dice probably benchmarks to around 15-point buy - adjust to more or less depending on taste. In the unlikely event you get >+5 for an ability scores, those could maybe be freely redistributed; you could also curve it so that higher scores are "more expensive" (or even just roll for points in point buy if you don't mind the extra complication.) For players who like having prompt but little wiggle room, it could be a rule that you can reroll any dice of your choice once, or twice, or even that you could reroll any number of times until you get something that inspires you.

But that's just off the top of my head, rather than really getting into the math or playing around with actual results. If I get some time later I could create a little JavaScript tool for people to play around with and/or generate some Monte Carlo datasets.


Ignoring alignment has always been pretty easy for me, both as a player and GM.

As a GM, I've always said: "Write down anything or nothing on the alignment section, whatever helps you roleplay. You can play a selfish character, and/or a ruthless one. Please do not play a character who can't get along with others, or who is an enthusiastic sadist."

As a player, I've just always wrote down what feels most appropriate on my character sheet and proceeded to forget about it. Oftentimes this involves pretty arbitrary decisions, esp. re: the Law-Chaos axis because nobody can agree on what that's supposed to represent, but the nice thing is it doesn't matter and I can just focus on what my character thinks and wants and believes.

Actually trying to think in terms of "my character is Lawful Neutral, so in this situation they would..." wouldn't be helpful, but luckily I don't have to, so I'm not too invested in what they do with alignment as long as it's not too mechanically entangled with other things - which it sounds like it isn't.


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Steve Geddes wrote:
DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:
But honestly, what is the point of ability scores if all you use is the the mod?

Gives my d6s something to do.

I’d really struggle with this. If they go this route I’m definitely going to need to accurately map 4d6 drop the lowest to resultant modifiers. I guess I’d roll “the old way”, get my answer and then just record the bonus. Feels a bit inelegant though. :(

An elegant way to roll ability modifiers directly is to roll Xd6, where X is what a character's bonuses add up to. Each die landing 1 adds to Str, each landing 2 to Dex, and so on. Roll a set of d6 of two different colors in order to incorporate penalties as well, each green die adding a point from the appropriate score and each red die removing one.

(To my mind, this combines the advantages of old-school rolling for scores (you can be surprised and build around the scores) and point buy (characters are balanced against each other.) To my mind roll-then-assign is the worst of both worlds because you're just rolling to see how good your character is. But that's separate from the main topic here.)


Ring_of_Gyges wrote:

I guess what I'm getting at is that it is problematic if it is both.

A human raised by orcs shouldn't be able to take the "stab people with your tusks" feat. How do you do that in the rules though if the character's species isn't part of the rules anywhere?

Conflating species and culture creates more problems than it solves. If the human above gets to pick from the 'orc tribes of Belkzen" list he is eligible for the tusks feat. If he gets to pick from the 'human' list he is eligible for cultural things he wouldn't have been exposed to in Belkzen. There might not even *be* a human list, there might be an Andoran list, an Osirian list, and so on. Why should he have access to any of those cultural traditions if he was raised from infancy in an orc tribe?

This is understandeable, but n.b. it's nothing new; you could very easily and legally construct a nonsensical background from alternate racial traits in PF1, which also combined ancestry and background, as well. I'm okay with some degree of manual supervision being required in any baroque exception-based system, whether that takes the form of letting a player take ancestry feats not of her official ancestry because it makes sense with her backstory, or requiring a fictional explanation for why the human raised by orcs has the tusks feat ("I learned orcish head-butting techniques, which let me do an equivalent amount of unarmed damage!"), or whatever.


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A dev (Seifter?) mentioned being able to make a functional Magus from the playtest materials, which could in principle be done through enough bespoke feats dedicated to that concept, but would be even more modular if it was an archetype that swapped out feats to add some extra arcane casting to any class: trade out some feats to turn a fighter into a magus, or rogue into an arcane scoundrel, or cleric into a mystic theurge, or uh I guess a wizard into a double wizard, &c. They haven't exactly said this is how it's going to work but there are a number of reasons that lead me to believe that it is.

(This points to one possible advantage of feats being feats being feats: what you swap out can just be feats simpliciter swapped out over some number of levels, without requiring that you swap out class feats (or whatever) specifically. And having global archetypes, which allows for a lot more modularity and options out the gate, is enabled by giving all classes common-denominated currency.)

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