Noodlemancer's page

I don't see any similarity in spirit, either; I have played both, extensively.

2nn Ed is heavily narrative (epic campaign settings, meta-stories), can be played sitting in armchairs around a coffee shop (David Zeb Cook wanted it that way), a lot of TotM play; 4th Ed is all about the Encounter, heavily leans into cool stuff you can do with pieces of plastic on dungeon tiles.

Ah, this is where our disagreement lies. 4e is also very narrative-centered, with tons of narrativist mechanics and even a FATE-style freeform skill system where stuff is supposed to be adjudicated by the DM on the fly. Doing only encounters is not playing to the system's strength. I both played and ran sessions of 4e without a single combat in them, and I loved them still.

The biggest issue I have with this is that boss enemies will be 2-3 levels above the party, resulting in hit chances around 30% for the party while the boss enemy has it around 70-80%, resulting in the boss constantly crits every other attack, which feels awful.
Wasting your action 70% of the time (aka a hit chance of 30%) should not be okay.
EDIT: 30% hit chance also makes the new action economy useless, as a second attack would already only hit on natural 20.

Noodlemancer wrote:

Vic Ferrari wrote:

Volkard Abendroth wrote:

gustavo iglesias wrote:

What is gone forever is the option to keep the status quo. Revolution is coming, be it one way or another, I feel.

That revolution may be a repeat of the one that took place with 4e.

A substantial percentage of the player base leaving for another company.

I really like some parts of PF2, the Action Economy, monsters, and the interaction between, I just hope this doesn't end up being Paizo's New Coke.

I'm not sure why do you consider New Coke to be some sort of a spectacular blunder.

Here's some facts:
1. According to literally all blind taste tests where they weren't told what is what, people preferred the taste of New Coke to Old Coke. The main reason New Coke was rejected by the public was that people subjectively felt "betrayed" by the company, not any objective lack of quality.
2. After New Coke was discontinued and Coca-Cola company returned Old Coke on the shelves, sales skyrocketed to significantly higher levels than before New Coke was introduced, meaning New Coke was a commercially beneficial project even though it never took off on its own.

I don't have a source on hand, but my understanding is that it also provided them an opportunity to switch the Classic Coca-Cola formula from using sugar to using the much more available high fructose corn syrup, without consumers being able to easily compare or readily notice the switch. I'm not 100% sure if it's true, nor where this fits into the whole Pathfinder Second Edition metaphor, but it's another interesting factoid. ^_^

That's only half-true. Before the switch to New Coke, some regions had Old Coke with Sugar, some had Old Coke with HFCS, with the split moving progressively further towards the latter of the two. After New Coke flopped and Old Coke returned, it was entirely HFCS, but it was already pretty close to that before New Coke.

The only thing I can imagine limiting the manticore is that he only has 12 shots. But then I guess those are mostly enough to kill a Party without a Healbot.

After running out of shots, the Manticore still has melee attacks at +15 attack bonus, which will crit more often than an improved critical rapier in pf1e...

Noodlemancer wrote:

Vic Ferrari wrote:

Volkard Abendroth wrote:

gustavo iglesias wrote:

What is gone forever is the option to keep the status quo. Revolution is coming, be it one way or another, I feel.

That revolution may be a repeat of the one that took place with 4e.

A substantial percentage of the player base leaving for another company.

I really like some parts of PF2, the Action Economy, monsters, and the interaction between, I just hope this doesn't end up being Paizo's New Coke.

I'm not sure why do you consider New Coke to be some sort of a spectacular blunder.

Here's some facts:
1. According to literally all blind taste tests where they weren't told what is what, people preferred the taste of New Coke to Old Coke. The main reason New Coke was rejected by the public was that people subjectively felt "betrayed" by the company, not any objective lack of quality.
2. After New Coke was discontinued and Coca-Cola company returned Old Coke on the shelves, sales skyrocketed to significantly higher levels than before New Coke was introduced, meaning New Coke was a commercially beneficial project even though it never took off on its own.

chances are high, Paizo will never bring Old Coke back

To be clear, I'm also very disappointed with PF2e and believe it's awful in the current state, I just do not feel comparisons with New Coke are valid, as New Coke was an actually good product, unlike PF2e.

Volkard Abendroth wrote:

gustavo iglesias wrote:

What is gone forever is the option to keep the status quo. Revolution is coming, be it one way or another, I feel.

That revolution may be a repeat of the one that took place with 4e.

A substantial percentage of the player base leaving for another company.

I really like some parts of PF2, the Action Economy, monsters, and the interaction between, I just hope this doesn't end up being Paizo's New Coke.

I'm not sure why do you consider New Coke to be some sort of a spectacular blunder.

I was the Double Slice Rogue there. During the Manticore encounter, I shot at it 15 times with a shortbow. 15 misses. That rather miffed me. Monster attack bonuses and AC's are way too inflated to the point where they are blatantly unfair towards PC's.

The spell can be used on any creature (including foes), and has no saving throw. As far as I can tell, using it as an offensive debuff in a fire damage heavy party to focus damage on a single enemy is the best use of the spell.

As the Rogue in the first of the two parties ran by Colette, it felt frustrating that the only sane way to open the door was to break it down, rather than to pick the lock, despite being a Rogue, being trained in Thievery, and having a thieves tools kit.

Have any of you who posted above actually played the game? I'm far more interested in what people who have played the game have to say.

I mean, I thought 4e read like a GREAT system...until I played it. And then, I thought it was horrible.

Words on a page only go so far. But, if you have played the playtest, I'd certainly be interested in hearing your experiences in that because, to me, that's really where the rubber meets the road.

I played through two different sessions as two different classes (Rogue and Demonic Sorcerer).

Sometimes style matters more than substance. Way back when the original pathfinder (1e) playtest rolled around, the general feeling you got when comparing pf to 3.5 was something like....

Awesome! All classes get these extra bonuses on top of what they had before! We get more feats per level! Favored class actually does something now! Races give more perks!

I got sucked into that playtest, and have been using pf as my dnd-clone of choice for several years now, and i have played a LOT of systems. Over time, since the 3.pf chassis is almost 20 years old now, you notice more and more cracks in the system, and last time i dm:d pathfinder i used something like 8 pages of houserules to make it palatable.

Last year Paizo released starfinder. I found that while not perfect, it showed that the Paizo team had learnt from some of the bigger flaws in the 3.pf engine, so when i heard about the pf2e playtest, i was pretty hyped.

And then we got....this. Even if the system is solid, it is just...boring?
All the perks of leveling up seems to upgrade you sideways or boringways, you get very few flavor or utility packed abilities, and the promised legendary skill feats (something i hoped would make martials catch up to casters) does very little, the backgrounds seem more limiting than fun, and the ancestries seem to just be a mishmash of clutter for your character sheet, rather than meaningful options.

In the end, i will skip this playtest, since my hype is dead. If there are some major revisions coming at a later date, i will look it over again and see if i can get a playtest group rolling, but with the material as it stands, i dont see where it fits in the market.

Combat focused? Dnd 4e
Rules light dnd? Dnd 5e (which also has brand recognition)
Grimdark? Shadows of the demon lord
Old school? DCC

I dont see how pf2e is going to be better than any of these systems, there would have been a place for a higher magic, more gonzo system, especially if martials had been given meaningful high level abilities,...

Completely agreed. The largest insult is the ridiculous nerf to Prestidigitation, which was never a particularly powerful or an imbalancing spell in the first place, but rather just a flavor trinket that people liked to have.

Noodlemancer wrote:

Vic Ferrari wrote:

Noodlemancer wrote:

They explicitly said 4e outsold PF1e for the entirety of 4e's lifespan, despite having a very poor reception overall, meaning brand does trump all.

I heard PF overtook 4th Ed in sales at one point.

Perhaps at some moment in time that was the case, but my point is that 4e was very financially successful and largely eclipsed Pathfinder in public consciousness outside of this local bubble despite being highly controversial, precisely because brand does trump all.

Yes, brand-recognition is huge; the brand name is definitely what led to the initial sales being so great.

And the important takeaway from that is that PF2e is fighting an extremely uphill battle. Being decent is not enough. Aiming for the same niche is not viable.

Gorbacz wrote:

5e went for a lower entry bar, which, mind you, is still higher than of any modern board game, and was able to smash Pathfinder's market position by ...

having the name "D&D" attached to it, for the most part

Exactly. D&D will beat any competitor by virtue of being D&D if they do the same thing. The only way to compete is to be meaningfully different. And given that 5e goes for the low power level kind of games, PF2e should take the other niche and be high power level.

I had pretty much no fun whatsoever.

Dying/Unconsciousness rules are way too severe and make low levels needlessly punishing. Deadly 1d10 on goblin shortbows makes it very possible for level 1 characters to drop unconscious from a single critical. Immunity to critical and precision on oozes is, in my opinion, an artefact of the past that I would like to see removed.

Worse yet, the character generation was too boring. No options excited me, I felt like I was picking slightly less bad options out of a sea of completely worthless options.

I'm considering dropping out of the playtest.

Hopefully this thread doesn't go down the tubes.

Anyway, I guess my personal hope for the direction is kind of twofold. First, and probably most importantly, culling all the fat. Pathfinder has hundreds of feats, but too many of them are either hyperspecific (Bull-Catcher style comes to mind) or a minor +1/+2 bonus (or both). If you get rid of all of those you have a very solid core of pretty good feats (maybe some are a bit situational, but still functional), and all the hyperspecific and +1/+2 feats could be combined into feats worth taking or that are more interesting and memorable. This also works with class options and archetypes to a certain extent, but those are a bit more restrained typically (and there's way fewer of them). Currently I think it went way too far in this direction where it cut the fat, the meat, and part of the bone out when restructuring everything. So instead of Pathfinder but leaner and meaner you have a skeleton that individual steaks are being stapled to.

Second I guess would be redoing Unchained, but with more classes and adding more options. PF1e has a decade of design already made, and there's piles of stuff that are great and piles of stuff that just didn't work. Consolidate all the stuff that was great and made the classes memorable and fun to play (Advanced Armor/Weapon Training for example) into the core rule set as a starting ground, make a few mechanical adjustments to how the game runs (like the HP changes, three actions, etc), rebalance numbers and spells, and tighten up rules text and I'd be super jazzed with the system as a whole.

I don't think just culling the fat would be enough. The niche I am suggesting in the OP is going even higher power than Pathfinder currently is - giving all the power to the players, and then some. That would be radically different from D&D 5e, would be the logical culmination of the paradigms of 3.5e, and would get players excited.

I think ancestry should be a beefy level 1 package and that is it. Let background be something that evolves with the character. Either way, right now it feels like ancestry is just a trait.

I think a middleground could be fun. Imagine if you started out as, say, more or less PF1e elf, but, over time, got to build up on that basis to become even elfier. You could maybe get even new fancy ways to use a longbow (after all, elves are famed archers), or open up some unique magic-related feats or even elf-exclusive spells. That would make ancestry a much more exciting part of the game.

A) Stop forcing people to color inside the lines. I'm finding this compartmentization of options to be frustrating and annoying. If everything is a Feat, just make them all feats. Seriously. Drop this. Now you get an ancestry feat, now you a skill feat, now you get a class feat, now you can have a general feat.

seriously Fk that.

You get a feat
select from General, Skill, Ancestry or Class.

(oh but they want to make sure you have a well rounded character. DON'T tell me how to make my character, sure as hell don't FORCE me to make my character to your standard. If I want to make a Fighter with a ton of Skill Feats let me do it. If I want a Dwarf to go all out on Ancestry Feats let me do it. If my character ends up gimped from my choices that's my problem.)

B) Make the redundancies general. This is the Druid name for the feat that gives you a bonus to will saves, this is the same feat but with a different name for Clerics, here it is again for Wizards but with a different name again.

Just make it a General Feat

Some of this stuff shouldn't be class specific at all. Why can't rogues be good at two weapon fighting? Why do only wizards and sorcerers get Metamagic (except for Reach which all casters seem to get, except bards for some reason). Why is Power attack Fighter only? Barbarians and Paladins don't know how to hit people hard for some reason?

My problem isn't as much with options being compartmentalized as with most of them being boring.

3e/3.5e thrived by encouraging player agency. The DM was relegated to a much more minor role than in AD&D, while players (especially casters) got tons of shiny and powerful options that allowed them to significantly influence the narrative.
Later on, WotC stepped back away from that paradigm, reducing player agency and bringing control back into the hands of the DM in 5e.
PF2e seems to be going the same direction, and my main question is why follow the market leader? That segment of the market is already cornered, it will be difficult to compete with D&D at the same thing they are doing.
Instead, in my opinion, it could be more productive to go the other route - give players more power. Shiny, cool toys. Options that make you go "wow!" instead of options that make you yawn. Things like that.
That can be a niche very different and separate from D&D 5e while being a fun game that, in my opinion, many people could appreciate.

I really like the Ancestry Feat concept. Being able to flesh out your Ancestry benefits over time is a cool mechanic.
However, I also see a fatal flaw related to that.
At level 1, all Ancestries feel extremely bland to me - you are essentially just a package of HP, movement speed, and vision type, lacking things that, according to setting lore, all members of an Ancestry should have (e.g. sleep immunity for Elves). The idea of building up on your Ancestry with Feats ultimately falls flat in my opinion if you build up on a blank slate instead of something that is interesting from the get-go.

I play several point-buy systems. I don't mind them. In fact, my favorite roleplaying game OF ALL TIME is Shadowrun. It's a point-buy game. I love it. The setting, the combat, the crunch...it's all good to me.

What I DON'T like, is a game that offers you an option to roll stats, then punishes you for doing so. Yes, most people don't roll stats as well as I do. I get that, I do. I've rolled some pretty piss-poor stats in my day and been forced to play them. It sucked.

But when I do roll, I always tell the DM that I rolled incredibly well and would have no problem offering up those same numbers for everyone in the party to use. Mostly, this is met with a good response. Though, there are some people that don't like using numbers they didn't generate. I can respect that. It's the same reason I won't play a pre-generated character. I have nothing invested.

The fact is, I, like Daedalus here, am an optimizer. I like scouring the texts available to get every ounce of benefit I can. Some call me a power-gamer because of this. Fine, I'll accept the stigma that comes with that. But to have the numbers to do so, only for the game to outright tell you "NO!" and giving NO reason for it, smacks of just being an angry parent yelling at their child.

It's pointless. It serves no purpose than to be limiting.

Now before anyone wants to try and deconstruct this argument with exaggerated hyperbole, no I don't mean you should be a fighter, but be able to backstab/sneak attack, or that you should be a monk and be able to cast wizards spells. To people that wanna blow it out of proportion like that, f*ck off! I'm talking about stats. It's where the game starts. If the attribute system is warped, it throws the whole game out for me. And being limited to no stat above 18, even though you have the numbers to go beyond that, and the game gives you no adequately explained reason why, it's a deal-breaker for me.

If that makes me a power-gamer, then so be it.

It's not a punishment.

Jurassic Pratt wrote:

So one of my favorite things about PF1 was that it was completely feasible to make a strength based rogue rather than a dexterity based one. I found it fun to work against the assumption and play a burly half-orc rogue with a greatsword and power attack, sneak attacking their foes.

However, it seems PF2 is sorta doing away with this concept or at least discouraging it.

The enworld iconic character sheet preview for Merisiel lists sneak attack as only working on agile and finesse weapons and a redditpost from someone who had played a demo mentioned a class feat that expanded it to work for clubs as well.

I for one am incredibly sad that now you are pushed towards being a typical dex based rogue who uses lighter weapons if you want to be able to use one of the class's most iconic abilities. At best it seems you'll have to pay a feat tax in order to be able to use sneak attack with other weapons, but it seems likely that many won't be possible to use with it at all.

I'm just hoping this will change in the playtest so that strength based rogues don't simply become a thing of the past.

Yeah, they really started pushing this in 4th Ed, and 5th Ed has carried the torch, and then some: Str is the premier dump stat.

You are incorrect. DEX/STR Rogues were the most popular Rogue build in 4e, adding both STR and DEX modifiers to damage. Moreover, Rogues had STR-based class features since the very first PHB.

Some of the aliens in First Contact with stats for PCs have +1/-1 ability score adjustments.

Unfortunately, they were stated to be outdated. Most likely, Alien Archive will update them to increments of +2.

As far as I can tell, the black knight from Monty Python was a fairly high-level Starfinder PC.
At high levels, if someone attacks you with a relatively low damage weapon, such as an Ember Flame Doshko, it takes a lot of hits to get through your SP to your HP. The same Ember Flame Doshko also has the Wound critical effect, which makes you dismember the enemy on a critical hit, rolling on a table to see which bodypart the enemy loses.
So, if someone uses an Ember Flame Doshko to attack a high level PC and are fairly lucky with their critical hits, the PC can lose both arms and both legs before losing even a single point of HP, only ever losing SP in the process, with that stamina being recoverable by simply resting for 10 minutes.
Let's call it a draw!

Noodlemancer wrote:

Renata Maclean wrote:

You don't get more attacks, but the ability to wield more weapons (and tools) can make you more versatile

Most notably, however, the Fusillade feat requires your character to have 4 or more arms

The saddest part about this is that you need a separate action to draw each weapon. Even with Quick Draw, you need four swift actions (more than an entire round) to draw all four weapons, making it impossible to use Fusillade until at least round 3, assuming you spent the first two rounds mostly drawing your guns.

I don't know about you, but in any situation it's not rude to do so that I expect to get shot at, I'm going to already have my weapons out.

I'm just generally sad about how useless Quick Draw seems in Starfinder.

One thing that I dislike about the archetype system is that different classes lose very different things from it, making the system feel very unbalanced overall: a Soldier who takes Phrenic Adept simply loses bonus feats, keeping all their main class features and not really losing anything important from it; a Solarian who takes Phrenic Adept doesn't get their first non-Zenith Revelation until level 8 and their second until level 14, practically crippling the class, given how strongly it is reliant on Revelations; an Envoy who takes Phrenic adept is stuck with only one Improvisation until level 8, which is very harsh when Improvisations are nearly the only class feature Envoys get.
I would have strongly preferred if it worked like VMC in Pathfinder, giving up feats for archetype features.

As a potential homebrew adjustment that makes archetypes more like VMC, here's this:
Features gained at levels 2, 4, 6, 12, and 18 are moved to 3, 5, 7, 13, and 17 respectively.
Features gained at level 9 stay at their original level, not being moved anywhere.
All features replace feats gained at respective levels instead of class features.
Since replacements are tied to feats, archetypes are linked to character level instead of class level, applying across all classes instead to only one class of the player's choice.

On one hand, from what you described, your DM doesn't understand the class, as multitasking is what it's designed to do.
On the other hand, closing the door to isolate you is a perfectly fair thing to do and something the DM was fully in their rights to do - it's simply reasonable for the bad guys to do so.

The damage calculations are off, because they don't account for the fact that trick attack isn't guaranteed to succeed, adjust for reduced accuracy on multiple attacks, or account for the debuff. Sniper weapons get full damage even if trick attack doesn't succeed, while small arms do much less.

Assuming an equal CR foe, that's a trick attack DC of 27.
3 (class skill) + 3 (insight bonus) + 7 (ranks) + 6 (ability score bonus and specialization bonus; may be higher or lower; ignoring the mistake where Ghost's Dex-based trick attack gets +4, since that will eventually be corrected) = 19
You need a roll of 8+, so we lose about a third of the trick attack damage. That brings the regular trick attack from 26 damage down to about 20.

The point is to allow snipers to not buy extra weapons.

You can take 10 on Trick Attack, and thus autosucceed.

Noodlemancer wrote:

Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

Noodlemancer posted the definition but it doesn't really help any. "Typical" and "Major" in regards to settlements is something made by your GM, meaning you need to ask.

"It does not matter if it is big, or small,"

That's kinda the issue, since "typical" and "major" aren't defined anywhere, meaning they're purely up to the GM. You the player can guess as to what a settlement qualifies as, but it would be just that, guessing.

Typical, in effect, means normal, meaning the majority of settlements will be such.

This is further reaffirmed by SFS allowing everyone to buy items up to character level +1, clearly showing that it's one of the game's assumptions that you can get items of that level.

Majority, but not all.

That's the GM equivalent stance (aka giving you permission) in SFS that you can buy items at +1, since otherwise there would be too much table variation due to possibly not having the same GM every time.

And majority cases is what you assume when you compare classes to each other. You don't make general comparisons based on rare exceptions like "the DM banned the Heavy Armor Proficiency feat", you make general comparisons based on general cases. Thus, in general comparisons, you assume level+1 gear is available, as that is stated to be the majority case in Starfinder.

As a potential homebrew adjustment that makes archetypes more like VMC, here's this:
Features gained at levels 2, 4, 6, 12, and 18 are moved to 3, 5, 7, 13, and 17 respectively.
Features gained at level 9 stay at their original level, not being moved anywhere.
All features replace feats gained at respective levels instead of class features.
Since replacements are tied to feats, archetypes are linked to character level instead of class level, applying across all classes instead to only one class of the player's choice.

The archetype system of Starfinder intrigued me when I read it as it applies to all classes, meaning the concepts you implement through it don't have to be class-specific and can, instead, represent broad character archetypes in the traditional sense of archetypes (as opposed to the mechanical sense).
That, in turn, feels interesting to experiment with.
Here, for example, I tried to implement a vampire "template" through archetypes and I think it showcases how the archetype system can be used for unexpected things across a broad spectrum of ideas and to provide more character creation options.

One thing that I dislike about the archetype system, though, is that different classes lose very different things from it, making the system feel very unbalanced overall: a Soldier who takes Phrenic Adept simply loses bonus feats, keeping all their main class features and not really losing anything important from it; a Solarian who takes Phrenic Adept doesn't get their first non-Zenith Revelation until level 8 and their second until level 14, practically crippling the class, given how strongly it is reliant on Revelations; an Envoy who takes Phrenic adept is stuck with only one Improvisation until level 8, which is very harsh when Improvisations are nearly the only class feature Envoys get.
I would have strongly preferred if it worked like VMC in Pathfinder, giving up feats for archetype features.

Speaking of undead, might we possibly see undead archetypes at some point? After all, a vampire or something similar would be difficult to represent with a race, but an archetype would do the trick well.