Polymathis's page

Wish: If you give us a hex based starship combat system then, for the love of Desna, please also give us ship miniatures or 'top down' ship tokens so that it is easy to establish facing and weapon arcs!

*Heart Emoji*

In the absence of ship miniatures (and the playability of the game really suffers without them) then printed hex tiles for ships with front facing marked... SF gave us a hex map, but nothing to use on it!

Having played d&d since the red box, through Ad&d 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, and PF1, I have to say it bothers me, but it’s about feel rather than detail.
It wouldn’t bother me if Magic Missile suddenly did d6 rather than d4 damage. I’m not even fussed if a classes fundamental abilities have changed. But it did bother me with 4e that an RPG that supported a predominantly ‘theatre of the mind’ game suddenly became a grid based miniatures game modelling a MMORPG - to the point where I jumped ship to Pathfinder after a literal lifetime of playing d&d.
I’m still struggling to place PF2 - some of it feels familiar (good), but other parts feel ‘not d&d’ - so struggling to love it at the moment. At least it doesn’t feel as alien as 4e/5e does to me, so I’m hopeful it will grow on me with more play. It took a while for 3e to feel like home as well...

Loved: All of the classes, and the archetypes and other options to go with them.

Wanted: The Harrow Medium - please just make the playtest version a downloadable freebie or something!

Hated: The snarky and sometimes vicious sarcasm on the message boards - oh wait, thats probably not going anywhere :(

Will miss: Nothing - I've got a fifteen+ year (real play time) backlog of 1st edition material to play through! :)

I know I might regret asking this, but have you ever heard of computers?

LOL. I have a masters degree in Information Systems, and IRL I work for one of the worlds great national libraries as Head of Information Management. Sometimes it’s just relaxing to build a small hardcopy index for a collection that doesn’t run to hundreds of millions of entries... that’s part of the hobby for me. Even in hardcopy I can usually track down a specific answer faster than my players can find it on a google search... :)

A continuation of the first 30 years of Dungeons and Dragons, once Wizards lost the plot and created an entirely different game with that name.

The best iteration of the d20 system.

A complex game of intricate character design, context specific subsystems, and millions of options, used to support the best fantasy RPG stories on the market.

From what I've seen of the playtest I am hopeful that Paizo will at least continue to tell the 'best fantasy RPG stories on the market'. The rest of what I love, not so much. :(

Love:
1 - Three action system
2 - The concept of the new alchemist using alchemical items (but the execution is pretty dire)
3 - Weapon traits

Hate:
1 - Tight maths and scaling challenges means you can run the game on coin toss without stats or dice - success is always approximately 50/50 so your characters never get any 'better' in comparison to the challenges.
2 - Resonance / disposable shields / everything else designed to stop you using equipment and magic items in the logically intended fashion
3 - Skill investment is worthless (Legendary feels no better Trained as the math is too tight), and Skill Feats do not feel as if you have accomplished a 'feat' any more than getting out of bed is a 'feat' of agility - most skill feats are something anyone trained in the skill should be able to attempt with varying success.

Houserules:
1 - Shield always grants bonus without wasting an action
2 - Retain skill point progression from P1e
3 - Break Ancestry into Race and Region and restore core racial abilities from P1e

Love:
1 - Three action system
2 - The concept of the new alchemist using alchemical items (but the execution is pretty dire)
3 - Struggling to think of anything else...

Hate:
1 - Tight maths and scaling challenges means you can run the game on coin toss without stats or dice - success is always approximately 50/50 so your characters never get any 'better' in comparison to the challenges.
2 - Resonance / disposable shields / everything else designed to stop you using equipment and magic items in the logically intended fashion
3 - Class locked feats that make no sense (many abilities in life can be learned regardless of your chosen profession...), ancestry feats that make no sense (innate species abilities should be innate, and cultural abilities should depend on upbringing), calling everything a feat...
4 - Spell points are used for everything except spells. Ummm, what?

It is also partly about the strange coincidence that adventures always seems to be lucky enough to face encounters +/-3 the level.

My games have always explained this away by saying that the DM's narrative focus is on the lucky ones. What you don't get to see is that 'offscreen' hundreds of 1st level wanna-be adventurers walk into dungeons guarded by dragons, manticores, stone golems and the like, and are therefore never seen or heard from again...

I too want Pathfinder2, not an entirely new system with a Pathfinder logo.
I want the maths on show, with a clear family tree tracing back to D&D3.5. I do want the complicated to be simplified, but I want the genuinely and legitimately complex to be left alone. I want many rich character options in strongly differentiated classes.
And like Mark, "I want Pathfinder fans and new Pathfinders alike, here and elsewhere, to be excellent to each other as we work on discovering, understanding, and improving the new game together."

I almost never post on here - the last time I made a non-AP post was when Pathfinder was first announced, and what I said was 'You have my money!'

The reason I whole-heartedly backed Pathfinder, and have bought every hardback, AP, and adventure for it, is that it was Dungeons & Dragons by another name in a way that 4e wasn't. 4e didn't deserve the name of Dungeons & Dragons and neither does 5e - they are an entirely different game that has no continuity with basic / 1e / 2e/ 3.0 / 3.5 - and that is in terms of feel, playstyle, whatever - the rules dont 'feel' right.

So that's my plea for PF2e - change whatever you like, but don't lose the feel baked into the game's DNA. I have been playing 'real' D&D in whatever guise for 30+ years now, and I don't want to stop.

I love Paizo. I love the respect that you have for your customers, and the quality of your products and storytelling. I truly don't understand some of the quite vicious negativity that I see on these boards; its the reason I don't play PFS.

I get that 10 years is a long time in this industry without a refresh, and I agree that one is needed. I'm cautiously optimistic about PF2e, and if I don't like it, I have probably another 15 years of content from PF1e still to play, and I thank you for that.

For what its worth, I also have some minor observations based on what has been revealed so far:

- Please keep the maths 'on show' rather than invisible to the players/GM; thats a major part of what makes a game 'D&D' for us

- Please dont oversimplify. Some of my players have been cheating on me and playing in a 5e game, and just last night they said that what they preferred about Pathfinder was the vast array of customisable options. 5e is simplistic to the point of feeling like a board game. Its just flat.

- We love Starfinder. We like the revised action economy, so the changes in PF2e to action economy sound good to us. We like the 'scalable' weapons in Starfinder, but thats in a SciFi setting; we're not so sure that will 'feel' right in a Fantasy setting.

- We hate the Starfinder Archetypes. Please don't do that in PF2e -
class based variations are what we love about PF. We quite like Themes though; the suggestions of what options to put together to create a specific type of character are good - we effectively use them in the way we use some of the more vanilla Pathfinder Archetypes.

The Grand Finale - final PC death:

PC Name: Heather (Female Elven Ranger Lvl 20)
Adventure: Dawn of a New Age
Location of Death: Under Lashonna's mansion
Catalyst: Combat death
Long description: Ripped in half (critical hit) and then swallowed and digested by an Overworm.