Norade's page

Norade wrote:

Would it be that hard to balance a Wizard who's made their fireball do less damage but over a larger area? Or the wizard that wants to fire a single big magic missile instead of a massive spam of them? Or for a sorcerer to put just a little more oomph into a big spell, by using an extra action or lower-level spell slot, when the chips are down?

To me, yes.

The more the limits, the better the balance.
This is a concept which goes with everything ( I can think of the difference between video games with more or less RPG component, to say one ).

More customizaion ( in the way you proposed it ) leads, inevitably, to more powercreep.

Leaving apart spells for now, just thinking about of the CRB classes and dedications balance compared to the current one should properly do the thing.

Is balance so important that it's worth sacrificing customizability to achieve it? I've never thought so but I'm also more and more becoming a fan of older games and more character-driven games. I think it's way cooler for a character to spend a resource, declare something about a scene to be true, and advance the story that way than to crit by happening to roll a large enough number.

I generally don't like guns in fantasy games. There are exceptions (I prefer to play pirate games with guns and cannons, for instance, and I am working on a Victoriana-style adventure which includes repeating rifles and revolvers), but in general I really dislike it without specific buy-in. If firearms were ubiquitous in Pathfinder, I never would have bought the game to begin with. It wouldn't be the game I wanted to play, so I simply... would have discarded it entirely.

I suspect that's a good part of why things are separated the way they are in Golarian. Things are generally modular, so you can bring in the aspects you want more easily while excluding things that aren't part of the base assumption.

Now, my own attitude toward gunslingers and the like has softened a little, I allowed a gunslinger in my Night of Gray Death campaign that just started, but I generally dislike them in games of the sort. I think that the adventure lends itself to a feel that makes guns feel more acceptable to me, but that could just be internal quibbling.

Anyway, yeah. If Paizo ever goes all-in on guns everywhere in-setting, I'll probably stop buying anything set in Golarion.

Do you have a reason for this strong dislike? I'm not baiting, just genuinely curious as to why so many people dislike them as much as they do.

Others are and they're available for them.

Two years post-launch, on basically one class.

I don't think it has anything to do with "inaccuracy". Fantasy RPG worlds are generally a kitchen sink pile of weirdness anyway, so pushing to require firearms be ubiquitous based on "historical accuracy" seems weird to me. They're available, but walled off mechanically so those who don't like them can avoid them.

By all means, do that. I'm asking that they be made a core item that people are free to ignore rather than an add-on that people need to wait to use.

My problem with guns from a "realism" standpoint is that guns change the world and they did so long before they advanced enough to be useful for heroic adventurers. If you were emulating reality, you might have plate armor and rapiers and guns, but the guns would be mostly confined to cannon and slow firing arquebuses or the like. That makes the guns things that transform warfare long before they'd be effective for adventuring. You'd run into bandits or other humanoid enemies attacking you with a volley, rather than being able to use them yourself.

Those would likely be at least mid-level foes as guns, and more to the point a good supply of gunpowder should be a rare resource on par with a magic item; incidentally, I also feel the same way about plate armor.

Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.

Building up the industry needed to have firearms be that common takes a long time. That won't change too much if guns are just better than they should be.

As for your idea that either guns are NPC-only items or ahistorically good, I don't think that needs to be entirely true. I'd just have PC guns be well-made prototypes that their owners tinker with to make them more accurate. Keep the very long reload times and high lethality and make guns the equivalent of a mid-level spell like Scorching Ray. You fire your shot and either drop your weapon, fix your bayonet, or take cover for a while and try a series of skill checks to see how quickly you can reload. Even enemies might volley once with muskets hoping for a few lucky hits and then drop them for polearms or bows, or else they'd have to fire smaller volleys and exchange empty guns for loaded ones to keep up a once every few rounds rate of fire.

In any case as long as guns are rare outside of armories they shouldn't overwhelm the flavor of a more traditional fantasy game.

PF2 is already a phone book, so no matter what you're a fan of, something's going to wind up getting cut. Firearms for Pathfinder 2e especially represented a problem because they struck against touch AC which was always a lot lower than normal AC. Then PF2e abolished touch AC -- so now you've got to figure out how you're going to balance firearms. I don't think they had the answer to that question when PF2 core was released 3 years ago.

I think it's fair to say your question is more "Why are firearms considered uncommon/rare", in which case yes it's a thematic choice on the part of the writers. If you disagree with it, well, that's what Guns & Gears is for.

Of course, one book shouldn't seek to contain everything a game will ever need but it would be nice if an entire type of weapon wasn't always on the cutting room floor with an edition change. Firearms aren't just rare, they don't seem to be considered a core of the game by any major developer even when the lore has shown them to exist as fairly common items in some corners of its world. If the same happened with full-plate or druids people would be up in arms even though druids as portrayed in fantasy likely never existed and plate armor was of the same level of hard to obtain as firearms.

I also don't buy that it took two years of development for the game to get the niche and class-restricted firearms that we did wind up with but I find most post-CRB content to be a bit lacking in terms of delivering what the fluff promises. YYMV on that issue.

I can only imagine that the designers had their reasons for doing it the way they did.

They very likely wanted to make both halves fully useable in campaigns where one or the other didn't fit the tone. There's no real harm in this but they were, as they have been in many things post-CRB, extremely cautious and left a lot of design space unused trying to color within the existing lines.

The assumption of PF2 broadly is that if something is not for everybody or every game, it's better to mark it uncommon so GMs can say "yes" or "no" when asked, rather than expecting the GM to comb through every conceivable option to preemptively ban they ones they don't want to deal with.

When you play with completely random strangers as your GM this can get inconvenient, but for a GM "marking something like guns uncommon, and giving nobody access by default except for the gun class" is the easiest way to do it.

But top level choices, that you make at first level, are the easiest ones to do pre-clearance on anyway. I don't know about other people, but I make way more first level characters (and sketches of later level plans) than I ever get to play anyway.

That seems pretty at odds with Golarion's grab-bag theme park-style world where wuxia rubs shoulders with steampunk and fur-wearing barbarians.

Plus, the classic plate we picture knights wearing never existed in a time when firearms hadn't been invented. The fact that people have a shaky grasp of history and let that color their idea of high fantasy is something we should work to fix, not something to be expected and catered to.

Yeah that's not a priority for 2e. Things like alchemist immortality don't exist short of getting the sun orchid elixir. Like it or not, 2e is 'gamier' than 1e. Best to appreciate it for what it is

You can have the rules be gamier, I have little issue with that concept. What I have an issue with is the lore not mentioning the massive change. One thing 4e did well was to explain the change to how magic works with an in-universe explanation.

Too modes of doing a spotless caster to me are the first exhaustion (fort save based) basically casting a spell requires you to make a Fort save against a dc based on the spell level or become fatigued and can't cast anymore. With feats and class features for managing fatigue and scaling penalty for casting more spells after the first.

The second is have a spellcaster based on a gather power mechanic that limits what spells you can cast depending on how many actions you take.

Both are probably to big a departure to ever fit in 2e but I think both would be pretty cool.

You could have a caster combine those ideas, the gather power action uses a skill check to determine results with the DC made lower for each action used. You'd essentially gain temporary spell levels in a pool that are used up by casting spells. So a 5th level character might gain 5 spell levels on a critical success, 4 on success, 3 on failure, and 2 plus stupified 1 on a crit fail.

The tricky part would be making it so that you don't end up in a two-round loop of gathering energy and casting your highest level spell, repeating until enemies are finished as that is too slow for easy fights and over-tuned in longer combats. You could make feats that let you start each battle with a set number of spell levels in your pool to solve needing to charge for a round in easy fights and have the DC scale with each check to stop longer battles from being trivialized.

I guess we will agree to disagree. Not saving someone's life when it costs nothing is Evil IMO.

Does the character know this? From their perspective they see a single emaciated beggar, they may see them every day and have no reason to believe that this day sees them any worse off than the last. They may have given them bread and other support for a while, witnessed no improvement and decided to cut support for a lost cause. None of these acts are evil.

EDIT: Is a person who gives 9 times but doesn't give the 10th time evil? If there's a row of beggars is it evil to give to one and not all? Is it evil if you give to only the most pathetic beggars and not the ones that look healthy? Is it evil if you only give to the ones you feel have a chance and ignore the lost causes? Where do we draw the line at how much charity a person has to give to stay good?

Norade wrote:

My thing isn't that I want power*, what I really want are options and detailed specificity in character design.

That 3.x/PF1 style of character building was wildly all over the place in terms of which bits made a variable character. What I want is that with the top 20% at each end brought in towards the middle. Yes, that means you can still build a fairly useless character, but it also means you can build your character and not just your spin on an archetype. That's what keeps pushing me away from PF2.

Pf2 keeps drawing me in with its slick 3-action system and being a modern fantasy RPG with familiar design elements AND build options, but it loses me when I try to make a character feel like it's mine. There just isn't room for that and a lot of my favoured archetypes aren't even supported yet and may never be supported. PF2 is so close to what I want that what I see as its flaws become even more repulsive than 5e's many issues and complete upfront lack of customization.

*I will acknowledge that a higher base level of power can help represent certain characters better than PF2 can, but that isn't my main desire.

I wasn't actually trying to suggest that your thing was power. Power is easy - you just run a game where the enemies are relatively straightforward and also a level or two on the low side.

I was speaking mostly to the audience there. Many here perceive me as merely wanting a more powerful character and simply hating on PF2's tight balance for that reason. I'm merely a pessimist caught in a loop of being drawn to PF2 and then repulsed by its details.

My point was about PF2's attitude towards system mastery. It's allowed, and even encouraged, but the payoff at the end - where you look at what you have wrought by means of your system mastery - is limited.

I like using system mastery to make oddities that take tragically underpowered ideas good enough to play at a table that's playing low twos and threes on the old 3.x tier list. PF2 doesn't offer this ability partly because even the Artificer isn't that bad but mainly because its options are all so heavily gated behind rules that state, in essence, "This class, and only this class, can do X within these specific limitations." I want to make a user of X that doesn't also do the Y & Z associated with that class but that can do B from one class and F from another.

I suppose that another aspect is that for all its magic, this is a heroic game, rather than a superheroic one. It does pretty well at representing things like Conan, LotR, or Thundercats. It does poorly at representing the worlds where people have specific unique weird powers that they can use at will and that grow slowly over time (like, say, One Piece). It's also one where a fair number of the classes are very specifically themed. Summoners, Magii, and...

Yes, every class in PF2 grows sideways but not vertically. This isn't generally how heroes in fiction tend to grow. This is why I suggested that PF2 was, to my mind and standards, bad at faithfully recreating many fantasy characters.

I want to play Yasseriel, Hammer of the Commons, Bane of Unbelievers who has a smite, heavy armour, and a charisma focus. Not the version that has to be built on a Warpriest, Champion, Magus, or Barbarian. I want to make Nameless, a chimeric experiment unnamed and unwanted who nonetheless wishes to be a hero. I want to make Hungry Harry, the troll that jammed on a ring of sustenance and free of the curse of hunger gets to learn and grow and see if a troll can be more than just eating and killing. PF2 doesn't do a good job of allowing for outsider characters built from monsters or characters with extremely narrow focuses.

I simply can't overcome that as when I try to build a character I feel more boxed in by what I can't do than thrilled at the possibilities that PF2 offers. I struggle to see it as a system giving me things instead of a system that has stripped many options and sold me back other options as a class or ancestry feat. If there were a class that just did one cool thing, without tap dancing around action restrictions, that could be my door in but I haven't found that yet.

The second does not share their bread so that they can feed ducks who do not need it.

Yet we're not given any insight as to why. They could hold a belief that their bread is too stale to give to another human. They could be so burnt out as to not have the mental fortitude needed to acknowledge the homeless person. They may simply not believe in charity at a personal level instead preferring to invest in changes at a policy level.

Without knowing why they pass them by this is a neutral act.

And the third one beats or even kills the starving man : "begins to treat him as cruelly as the first or second Evil characters would have done."

I acknowledged that in my point:

"This becomes evil if in the future they do as the first example would but stays potentially good if they merely ignore that one begar while preaching to others that have yet to reject them."

So beating them is always 100% evil. Preaching, being rebuffed, and ignoring them for those who do take your help and follow your rules can be good if the intent behind it is good.

At the risk of being moderated again, I'm once again going to quote KC's example of people dealing with a starving homeless person. This isn't to call out KC and I don't wish KC to respond if they feel it would harm their mental health, I merely think it's a good example to use to show my own thoughts on the matter.

The first Evil character sees a starving man on the side of the road. She goes out of her way to harm the man in some way--robbing him, killing him, cheating him, mocking him. She didn't have to do this. She is not starving to death herself. This is unambiguously evil.

I think we can all agree that this is evil.

The second Evil character sees a starving man on the roadside. She happens to be carrying a sack full of loaves of bread. She is well-fed, and she's taking these loaves to go and feed the ducks, even though the ducks are also well-fed. She refuses to help the man, even though it would cost her literally nothing. Perhaps she thinks poor people deserve to starve, or perhaps she just doesn't want to be bothered. This is evil, albeit more passively so--and not just because she's feeding ducks bread (don't do that). She is allowing a man to die in front of her despite having the means to save him easily and casually within her grasp.

This is closer to neutral as this person could have any number of reasons for not sharing their bread. Furthermore, if this is evil most of us are evil for not doing things within our power to fight evil.

The third Evil character sees a starving man on the roadside. She has only one loaf of bread, but she goes and shares it with him, feeling compassion for his plight. She talks to the man and comforts him, reassuring him that one day, her (evil or amoral) deity's blessings will shine upon him, as they have her. The man reacts with disgust--he's a follower of a goodly god. Upon seeing his reaction, and hearing his faith, the Evil character immediately loses all sympathy, and begins to treat him as cruelly as the first or second Evil characters would have done.

This one could be arguably a good act. Yes, this character worships a god which the person in need thinks is evil, however, without having a guide to every diety as we do, the character in question may think that this god is actually good. After all, from their perspective, they've been granted strength and asked only to do what they already saw as a moral thing to do.

This becomes evil if in the future they do as the first example would but stays potentially good if they merely ignore that one begar while preaching to others that have yet to reject them.

This example can also be flipped to the real world. A church that provides shelter but kicks people out for not following strict rules or a rehab facility doing the same. Perhaps we should offer all help unconditionally, but rarely does that actually happen. Is it evil to offer help with strings attached and to withdraw support once it's clear that your requests will not be met?

Moderated out some real-world political references that border on hate speech against a religious group. I'll be keeping an eye on it and if it starts to go off rails I will be locking it for the rest of the weekend.

Can you be more specific? I had a post go and I have no idea what part of it you took objection to? It's hard to avoid doing things that will be moderated if the mods don't give details even via PMs.

Except that's not really what's happening. The objective morality they have attempted to produce and reinforce in the setting has generally been sold as following a generally moderate/left and relatively progressive bent. It's been more or less the stated goal of the creatives and of the company.

That isn't an objective standard of morality. Unless they can create a logical constant system for sorting any given action, paired with any given intent, paired with any given outcome into the boxes of lawful good, neutral good, etc. no real-world system can ever claim any kind of objective morality.

On top of that, not everyone is really willing to engage with media that props up objectionable material as 'good actually', especially not media that actively requires personal participation and interaction with it.

Except that nobody is calling that particular action good. Evil can be done even by good people. Saints can be sinners. Morality is complex and painting it all in solid colours with no shades does a disservice to a setting that ostensibly tries to feel real.

Norade wrote:

My question is, why can't we have problematic things in games? Dwarves can be mostly good, if stoic, folk who have deeply flawed values when it comes to ancient foes. Given their long lives and rigid society it would also make sense for these views to change very slowly. A lot of Dwarves will have, to use modern parlance, a boomer mindset the sort of afable but racist grandparent that makes you cringe but has a generally decent sense of right and wrong.

At least that's how I use them.

The problem is when those problematic things - in this case, merciless violence against entire peoples - can be presented as Good-aligned. At present, a Dwarf Paladin of Torag could make the case that they’re entitled and obligated to slay every orc they see - and while I think anyone with sense would tell them no, the text itself arguably encourages this interpretation.

That's only a problem if the player and GM both see things the same way. In such a case, that's an issue with that group and they would likely ignore the new lore in favor of what fits their ideal world. In all other cases the GM should act to make it clear that such is not Torag's will.

Violent hatred of orcs and drow isn’t presented as a traditionalist, regressive flaw in dwarven culture - it’s presented as a cool perk, central enough to the fantasy of being a dwarf to make it into the core rulebook and arguably sanctioned by a core Lawful Good deity.

So? One bad trait isn't enough to shift alignment. Even in a world of absolute morality I argue that it is the net vector of one's actions on the chart that determine good or evil. You are free to set your scale differently, the game gives no useful guidance on how alignment should be measured.

My question is, why can't we have problematic things in games? Dwarves can be mostly good, if stoic, folk who have deeply flawed values when it comes to ancient foes. Given their long lives and rigid society it would also make sense for these views to change very slowly. A lot of Dwarves will have, to use modern parlance, a boomer mindset the sort of afable but racist grandparent that makes you cringe but has a generally decent sense of right and wrong.

At least that's how I use them.

Sounds like the Red Warlock in Oglaf (Realistic Goals).

That specific comic is safe, but other comics on the same site are NSFW, so no link.

Exactly, only I used that as a GM tool to stop stupid stuff like that from happening at my table.

Norade wrote:

Ascalaphus wrote:

I generally like to plot more in "here's a problem, you're powerful adventurers, I'm sure you can come up with a solution" kind of way. So if the players find a different solution that doesn't disrupt my plans very much.

I tend to prefer to write my dungeons and stories as if every major stronghold will be tackled like a SWAT raid or Heist. I also have genre-aware enemies, wizards that lair in the middle of their tower rather than at the top as one example, because in a world with flight the top of a tower isn't safe. If the party wants to spend a session on nothing but planning and crafting items needed to pull off the raid that's a session well spent in my book.

Really genre savvy wizards just have private permanent demi-planes that they astrally project from and never leave.

At sufficiently high levels of course that's what they did. That 7th level necromancer in his tower worked with what he had and hoped to live long enough to get a demiplane.

- It's not really meant to summon monsters better. Not really what it does. It's got some feat support, but that's more of a side thing.

What is the class called? If it wasn't meant to summon they should have called it an Edolonist or a Totemist.

- Electric Arc plus Eidolon grab/trip looks like it's pretty decent for combining control with damage-dealing. It's true that the plant makes it better.

Only when all the parts work. If you have either mode fail it's pretty awful.

- I personally found the level of customization gratifying. I'm sorry you found it inadequate.

People want PF1 level options. You can draw back lots of power from a PF1 concept and people will be happy. If you start taking away things they could do entirely, people get upset.

- I can at least see the argument about having two bodies on the field. Have you tried three? You can take an Eidolon and a companion.

Why not just hire mooks at that point?

That's an unfair comparison and you know it.

Both parties should be expected to overcome the exact same challenges in PFS or AP-based play. So shouldn't they be able to use their unique strengths to do that?

- The Druid is a generalist if anyone is. It's just a particularly powerful one.

Yeah, the Druid is in the generalist slot of the specialized party. There to solve issues that the rest of the group can't.

- The Witch isn't more of a generalist than any other caster. It's just the (often accepted as) weakest caster.

Would you like a Wizard instead, does that meaningfully change anything for the party?

- The alchemist has design issues, and requires a very particular kind of player to run at full effectiveness.

Isn't it supposed to be just as good as every other class? Shouldn't all those alchemical items be enough to push a party over the top?

Also, if you replace Alchemist with a Summoner does party-B actually get much better at solving challenges?

- The Bard is generally accepted as being somewhat OP overall, and with good reason. It's also at least as much of a "generalist" as the witch is - it just has the "specialist" stuff added on top of that.

Bard is the specialist party buffer which is what people claim a well-played Alchemist does. Can the ultimate generalist not find a place even in the generalist party?

You're basically taking the five strongest classes you can find, comparing them to a selection of classes that are generally accepted as relatively weak and/or difficult to play, with no particular party synergy, and saying that that should be used to judge an entirely separate class that isn't any one of them.

It's a party that might see play at DF's table versus one that probably wouldn't, presented as a generalist vs specialist problem.

Also, that "face in open combat" is pretty much exactly what @Mathmuse was talking about. Yes, the specialists (because the Champion, Fighter, and Cleric are specialists, and the Bard might as well be) do better when matched up into a synergystic team, "in open combat". That's pretty much exactly what they're specialized...

So what types of problems can the second group solve easily enough to make up for being terrible in battle?

Specialization tactics work great in ordinary battles and fail on other occassions. Versatile tactics work okay all the time. Specialization failure is more likely to kill the party than versatile underperforming when the specialists work great.

That's only true if the party were all specialized to face the same threats. I feel like what he's saying is that a party where each character does one thing, as well as PF2 allows for, will beat a party of generalists.

For example which of these parties would you rather face in open combat:

Fighter, Champion, Cleric, Druid, Bard

-or-

Swashbuckler, Monk, Oracle, Witch, Alchemist

I feel like the first team just has more impact in most battles while only struggling with edge cases and intentional gotcha-type encounters.

Here's what I was getting at:

Magic weapon that gives you stats that trivialize encounters = boring because now all the encounters are trivial.

Magic weapon that gives you stats that are bigger than when you don't have one but aren't so big as to trivialize encounters (because it's a "math fixer") = boring because why? because it's not providing you the other boring option, but it at least gives you something that isn't "and now the game doesn't even function anymore."

The game designers have to choose between A) the system actually making the character "helpless without their special tool", B) players feeling like they are "helpless without their special tool" because having it makes them so much of a bad-mammajamma they rip through encounters like wet paper, or C) not having magic weapons give significant enough increases to numbers on the sheet to make players give a hoot whether they have one or not.

All of the options are "the boring option" to someone (sometimes even to the same people), but one of them provides both a functional game and attempts to give the people what they asked for as far as magic weapons that feel like they matter.

Or you could make weapons with conditional bonuses that make simple stat fixing interesting.

Example:
-Blood Iron Blade: When the character wielding this weapon falls below half HP for the first time each battle they may choose to enter a rage. If they do, in addition to the normal effects of raging, they heal Con Modifier on each successful hit. If a character wielding this weapon is already able to rage, double the bonuses and penalties of that rage.

-Flying Dagger: Once per battle this weapon allows the character wielding it to gain a fly speed equal to their movement speed. If this movement is used to charge an enemy add an additional +2 to hit. If the enemy is hit by this attack they become flat-footed until the end of their next turn.

Just make every magic weapon along these lines. If you must include a pure damage weapon make it high level and add a rider to that damage.

The math is the way you make something feel powerful and important.

It's the mechanical way to do that. Where I think we disagree is that this is where power starts and ends with you and your group. If magic sword isn't above x% level of improvement gold will be spent elsewhere or your players will sulk and buy nothing and dislike the game.

My tables go from loot being a party of every build and gained like clockwork at each level to the rusty sword example. If I'm being a bastard I can even get players to not take better gear because they don't want the added attention it would bring from foes well above their level. If you want to cure a party of their desire for loot really fast, just have a level+4 group waiting outside the dungeon ready to jump the players and take their loot.

There is a game where the math advancement isn't tied to magic items and it's called 5E. You don't need to even see a magic item. You can use the "rusty sword" with a legend example above.

If you want to make 5e follow PF2s math model, just give all enemies at certain levels +1 to AC for each tier of magic weapon the party expects to have. Do the same for their to hit numbers and suddenly the gear you claim makes 5e too easy works exactly the same as normal weapons but your players get a nice sugar pill of +1 goodness every few levels.