RPG-Geek's page

So, there is NOT currently a system that does this.

You should create your own then and prove to the world that
1) This can be done
2) There is a market for it.

Prove to people like me that it is possible and desireable.

I pointed out several systems that do a good enough job at it, even if many of them have their own warts.

As for making my own system, the rules aren't an issue. It's the art assets and editing as well as the low RoI on publishing an indy TTRPG. It doesn't matter how good your game is; the market is tiny and highly saturated, and prices are kept artificially low.

I have a system started, but its hard to be motivated to finish it when there's no economic incentive to take it from 80% to where it's good enough to publish.

RPG-Geek wrote:

You can embrace superheroic fantasy and verisimilitude simultaneously.

Please give me an example of a published game that manages this. I've only played maybe 50 odd different game systems so I might well have missed the game that manages this.

Certainly Gurps, Hero, D&D, Pathfinder, Cyberpunk, VtM, FUDGE, M&M, Song of Ice and Fire RPG, L5R don't come even remotely close.

I'll kinda define Superheroic fantasy as the genre where a group of 4-6 heroes can take on a group of giants or a dragon and expect to win.

Shadowrun isn't my favorite system, but it doesn't do too many things where I roll my eyes that my hyper-competent character can't accomplish a fairly basic task and allows for fighting literal giants and dragons.

RIFTS... The rules are a mess, and the editing is worse, but it does go out of its way to ensure that the flavor and mechanics mesh well and is designed to run everything from a rags to slightly better rags game to one where you battle god-like beings.

I find Eclipse Phase more interesting as a setting than a game to run, and it's a little abstract, but it does a good job of tying its setting into how your characters approach their missions.

You could hack something like the Riddle of Steel to push it into that realm, but it would be a stretch, given where the game is starting from in terms of scale and lethality.

I've hacked magic into Cyberpunk before, and you could use the Maximum Metal rules to build a "Dragon" for the party to fight.

Ars Magica probably has the best feeling of being a mage researching and perfecting new spells and at the top end of its scale you get really strong.

I also strongly feel that building a system specifically to do realistic-feeling battles against epic-scale monsters is possible. You'd build out the monsters almost like how BattleTech builds mechs, with hit locations and "systems" that can be crit once the beast's hide is pierced. Characters are squishy and rely on having the right tools for the job as well as trading off who the monster is focused on. Ideally you rarely get hit at all, but an unlucky hunt is still going to leave a character or two with broken bones and injuries/ailments to recover from.

The Monk can beat the fastest person in human history at a foot race of double the length he is used to running.

(Generally speaking I think you are *strongly* devaluing the abilities of professional athletes.)

The monk, without magical enhancement, can do the 200-meter race in 20.18 seconds, while Bolt did it in 19.19. The last year that our 19th level monk would hold an outdoor 200-meter world record would be 1962. It's only at the 400-meter mark where our monk manages to finally clear the current record.

It feels weak when our fastest character can only barely edge out IRL humans while other classes are turning into animals, flying, conjuring fire, etc.

Even though I somewhat agree with some of RPG-Geek's arguments (like the highest movement speed a character can have is still lower than that of a regular, even if highly athletical person), the fact that the standard movement in PF2e is 25 feet isn't really because of balance or anything similar but because of tradition. 25 feet is the equivalent of 5 blocks of movement. Rather than saying 25 feet they could have said 50 feet and that 10 feet would roughly be 1 block of movement. That or say 500 feet and that 100 feat is 1 block of movement instead. I wouldn't be surprised if a future edition does what Star Wars Saga Edition did replacing the "base speed of 30 feet" of D&D 3.5 with "base speed of 6 squares" for simplicity.

I think most of the "realism ruins the fun" type of things are mostly relegated to skill feats in PF2e. Even post-Remaster Eyes for Numbers is a joke of a feat that shouldn't have been a feat in the first place, while every single Medicine feat is game changing in contrast. Also some rules like underwater combat are kinda limited for no reason when the expectation most people have playing heroic fantasy is that everyone is at least superhuman.

Even if I would even the most mundane martials like the fighter to have more supernatural stuff early on, I appreciate PF2e for allowing martials to not feel like an afterthought like in every other D&D edition or derivated product like PF1e. I'm not big into casters and I played martials in D&D 3.5. If you had a caster next to you they could, every day if they wanted, to learn or prepare certain spells and do everything you did as a martial but leagues better, while at the same time be allowed to prepare other spells the next day and play a different character. Martials are fun in PF2e and that's why I love the system.

The fact that martial characters are on par with casters is the biggest thing I'll give PF2 and Paizo credit for, but skill feats are a huge step in the wrong direction, and the three-action system ends up leading to balancing via action taxes, which tends to feel bad. This balance has also led to wide dissatisfaction with casters which highlights the way 4DOS can feel worse than a simple pass fail system tuned slightly in favor of the player succeeding.

You understand that this "tax feat" exists in D&D also in all versions from 3.0 onwards so that you want to shoot with a bow at a short distance (you do not need to pay for it if you want to use the bow only for longer distances). What if, to nerf is a valid option to turn a bow that trivialized its short version.

D&D 2024 only penalizes ranged characters being in point-blank melee range, so long as you're not standing right next to somebody, you're not taking any penalties. That's a far cry from taking penalties within 30 feet.

The shortbow should have been balanced for use by different types of characters, but if it wasn't, that wouldn't have been a huge issue. There are already plenty of weapons in PF2 that are only taken for flavor reasons.

You understand that most of the audience that plays D&D plays it because of the fame, or some love for the franchise, but most of them don't even know that there are alternatives, right?

Most likely the biggest reason why Pathfinder has fewer players today is due to less marketing than anything else.

R. Talsorian games is a far smaller company than Paizo and had a triple-A game and hit anime series made from the IP. Paizo can barely get companies that make their living doing CRPGs to touch their IP.

Perhaps the issue is that Golarion is so generic that Paizo's IP has no distinctness it can leverage to get outsiders on board.

Do you really understand the concept of fantasy?

That a fully heavy armor player might still want to have a shield and have it mechanically make him stronger, even if it comes at some cost in actions?

If that strength comes at the cost of an action, using the shield doesn't make that character better and allowing that character to shine comes at the cost of restricting defensive options that would otherwise equal it. Balance at the cost of extreme niche protection is hardly an ideal solution.

You're contradicting yourself here. You're simultaneously saying that the imbalance allows for a wider selection of characters, and then saying that it will need to be limited because it can't be used in 100% of campaigns.

There isn't a contradiction. GURPs allows you to build anything you can imagine, but you'd never want to use everything it has to offer in a single game. PF2 is the Henry Ford of games, you can play anything you want as long as it fits into this specific style and level of balance.

Besides, I don't see how PF2e's balance doesn't provide a better situation, where you can choose practically any option for practically any style of campaign, without having to restrict it.

PF2 doesn't allow for "practically any style of campaign". It does poorly at low fantasy games, can't replicate things that were possible in PF1, and doesn't do social-focused campaigns especially well. It's very good at being a specific kind of WoW-style theme park fantasy with well-balanced tactical combat that even PF2 fans will admit often has a fair bit of clunk with many classes being balanced by action taxes.

The only type of restriction that you often see GMs asking for is the removal of magical, divine or technological classes when the story isn't suitable for them.

The rarity system and the gating of spells by default suggests otherwise.

RPG-Geek wrote:

YuriP wrote:

But these games try to be balanced all the time! They seek balance, not the other way around. The issue is that balancing an asymmetrical game is a complex process that requires constant adjustments as serious balance flaws are found. This even applies to PF2e and D&D, which receive errata and adjustments between versions.

If they let go of balance, the game would end up being abandoned.

D&D publishes errata for rules clarity issues. Can you show me examples of things errated for power level reasons?

Besides the 5e remaster itself? But OK let's consider it a new edition. In all of them there is some degree of rebalancing, not just clarifying, but adding or removing content to change the balance of the game.

You're missing the forest for the trees here. I've never said that there is literally no balance in other games, but that balance is rarely the primary focus of a game's design. D&D 2024, while it did make some balance changes, did nothing to address the largest balance concerns of the system and showed no interest in doing so.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Is that what you call bleeding experienced developers and being widely lambasted for not paying a living wage for the area in which they're headquartered?

Alright, bud, this makes it pretty clear you aren't here to forge an actual debate. I'm not sure what your goal here is, but it's not to have a discussion if this is the kind of s*~& you're flinging.

Is it an unfair assessment of the situation?

But they are, and progressively so that they feel the improvement as the levels pass. Initially with the Double Slice, and gradually improving being able to switch both weapons quickly with the Lightning Swap, then improving his defense with the Twin Parry, then improving his sequential attacks with the Agile Grace and extra hits via reactions with the Twin Riposte and even more later with the Improved Twin Riposte, becoming even more precise with Graceful Poise or focusing on a more defensive stance that frees up actions with Twinned Defense until you reach a point where you can even parry and reflect spells with your weapons using Reflecting Riposte

The idea here is that you don't start out heroic, you become heroic!

My issue is that this isn't applied evenly and doesn't respect how easy or difficult a technique is. This can lead to situations where a dual-wielding character gets to feel like a hero from myth while a sword and shield character is paying feat taxes to use a shield in a way a trainee is able to use it with minimal training.

RPG-Geek wrote:

To beat Usain Bolt's record, you'd need to hit 70 feet of movement per action. A level 19 human monk with Fleet tops out at 65 feet per round without magical aid.

That sounds perfectly balanced to me -- an extremely high-level monk can go approximately as fast as the fastest human to ever live.

So the Wizard can rain fire from the heavens, but the Monk can't even beat a normal, if exceptionally experienced, human in a foot race.

Now you have the opposite problem, killing the fantasy of the fully armored knight with shield!

That kind of knight was fully armored in a chain haubark. Once large, rigid plates were the order of the day shields fell by the wayside. So if you wanted to be a sword and shield user, you'd have the advantage of wearing lighter armor that can be donned and dofted far more swiftly.

I think you didn't understand when I said that they took an old concept and made a new and interesting idea inspired by it.

Adding a penalty to a weapon and making you pay a feat tax to remove it isn't particularly interesting.

Last I checked a modern sprinter isn't lugging a damn backpack of loot around with them alongside strapped weapons, layers of magical clothing/armor, and doing so across various amounts of terrain. Add full military gear to a modern sprinter and see how fast their 100m dash is.

A human with no armor is still, without taking feats, slower than an NFL lineman at the 40-yard dash. Unless they invest in enhancing their mobility with magic or feats, the fastest they can run 40 yards is 9.6 seconds, while the *slowest* 40-yard dash at the NFL combine is 6.07 seconds.

Also, a level 20 human Fighter with the Fleet general feet (The LEAST we should be considering if we want a character who is fast) who isn't taking a speed penalty from their armor can, at 30 feet per action and using all three actions to Stride (Which isn't sprinting, by the by, and there are feats that allow you to more efficiently move) can run 300 feet in 3+(1/3) rounds, which is about 20 seconds, by the way. So I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but it ain't PF2.

I was using the base 25-feet-per-action speed with no bonuses or penalties as the baseline, which gives their time to run the 328 feet needed to complete a 100-meter dash as 26.4 seconds. Fleet cuts that to 18.7 seconds. Buff them further with a wand of tailwind, and they can still only manage the 100 meters in 14.6 seconds.

To beat Usain Bolt's record, you'd need to hit 70 feet of movement per action. A level 19 human monk with Fleet tops out at 65 feet per round without magical aid. Our literal superhuman loses to a guy without any form of supernatural ability.

Most of the games you mentioned use their balancing to drive sales, and lots of people who play those games complain about balance.

A loud minority complain, but they rarely stop playing or switch systems, or these games wouldn't be the giants they are.

Many people who play PF2 do so because they dislike how unbalanced 5e is.

Even if 90% of PF2's players play PF2 because they don't like how unbalanced D&D is that's a drop in the bucket next to all the people who play D&D.

I know people who laugh at the idea of the ranger not being one of the most powerful classes in 5e.

Those people are objectively incorrect. A pure Ranger build is only ahead of Rogue, Barbarian, and pre-2024 Monk. Every other class brings more to the table.

PF2 has its design goals and makes enough money to continue to grow, so maybe your just looking for something else.

Is that what you call bleeding experienced developers and being widely lambasted for not paying a living wage for the area in which they're headquartered?

And do you understand that in the end you are either forcing players to limit themselves or to seek optimization in order to play?

Yes, and I don't see an issue with that. A game with wider balance windows allows for a broader selection of characters to be built and a greater selection of stories to be told. The cost is that it takes more effort to learn and that you won't always be able to use 100% of the game's content in every campaign.

The funny thing is that the second cost exists in PF2 as well. Even a game with 8 PCs who take unique classes and try not to overlap skills playing in a game run by a hard-working GM that values variety in encounters still won't ever use more than a fraction of the total available options.

Or even that you are doing what PF2e already does by default, only worse, seeking balance by limiting what players can and cannot do? In addition to having everyone, and especially the GM, now have to deal with the responsibility of balancing the game?

Balancing the game, ensuring that everybody is having fun, and tuning rules to best fit their tables is the GM's job. Removing this from them because people can't be bothered to put in the effort to be a good GM is one of the worst trends in modern TTRPG design.

Not to mention that this does not solve the problem, inefficient things will continue to be inefficient and will be sidelined from the game or players will be forced to be weaker because they want to choose them and even the opposite is true. You still won't change the fact that the shield is super-efficient for example, or you will end up having to prohibit or restrict its use, all of this becoming a fair play inspector. It's terrible!

You keep harping that shields are super efficient, but this was never actually the case. In 3.x and PF1, AC was the weakest of all the defenses, and the best way to approach a fight was to go first and deal so much damage that everything was dead before it got more than a turn or two to act. A character focused on defense will instead invest in a miss chance, temporary HP, and contingency spells to remove them from combat or heal them from certain death. AC and base HP were essentially worthless when you could be stacking buffs and transforming into a dragon if you wanted to enter melee range.

Spending actions on the shield prevents it from becoming over-efficient. In D&D, the shield is so efficient that it becomes part of the armor, where you are punished for not having one, leading to a situation where the player only doesn't have a shield if it gets in the way of using something better than it. For me, it was a simple, elegant and even realistic solution by PF2e to spend actions to keep the shield up, demonstrating the focus on defending oneself with it.

You can easily solve this issue by making it so shields can only raise your AC to a certain level. This way, you'd see characters in plate armor stop using shields in the same way it happened in history.

The Volley trait of the longbow is a legacy from D&D 3.x/PF1, where the Point Blank Shot gave a hit and damage bonus on shots less than 30 feet away (practically being a +1 weapon in addition to its normal benefit). In PF2e, the designers had the idea of ​​making it more interesting by giving a penalty to shots made with it at close range as a way to compensate for the fact that it does more damage than a shortbow, while at the same time making the Point Blank Shot simply nullify this penalty and give a higher damage bonus to shortbows, thus avoiding the problem of the shortbow's devaluation while also giving a tactical use to both weapons. Not to mention that the concept of only using 2 hands to attack was added to it, allowing the use of a free hand for anything else without having to change grips.

Why bother with that bit of legacy support when you could have used that page space to do something interesting instead?

Fighting with 2 weapons has always been a difficult technique to master to the point that most melee weapons focused on fighting with 2 hands.

Shouldn't our heroic characters be able to express superhuman levels of skill, which enable otherwise inefficient fighting styles to flourish?

So having the benefit of a second weapon with different traits is already an interesting advantage in itself, there is no need to resort to the extra attack and also as already pointed out by colleagues here on the forum, this is a fantasy, it does not necessarily need to be realistic, additionally the fact that you use feats to fight well with 2 weapons reflects the additional training with this type of fighting.

A fantasy game should be reality+, while all too often, PF2 is reality-.

But these games try to be balanced all the time! They seek balance, not the other way around. The issue is that balancing an asymmetrical game is a complex process that requires constant adjustments as serious balance flaws are found. This even applies to PF2e and D&D, which receive errata and adjustments between versions.

If they let go of balance, the game would end up being abandoned.

D&D publishes errata for rules clarity issues. Can you show me examples of things errated for power level reasons?

TCGs are power creep, the genre, and rely heavily on ivory tower game design as a core pillar of their design. They are far closer to a 3.x/PF1 than they are to PF2 in terms of their focus on balance.

The same goes for wargames that often want to sell plastic first and rules second and thus will wildly shift the power level of units from edition to edition to force players to keep buying to stay meta-relevant. If PF2 did this, their errata would wildly shift class balance, and you'd see power creep in every new release.

Most game designers are not focused on balance first or even second. They focus on fun, design uniqueness, and monetization and place all of these factors far ahead of balance in terms of how they approach game design.

RPG-Geek wrote:

At least D&D doesn't make your character slow down their offensive tempo to use a shield properly, enter a stance, or shoot aimed directly fired shots using a longbow.

It does, however, think you should take a Bonus Action to whistle to your animal companion so it knows to bite a guy. A competent animal trainer can train their companions to do things with subtle movements or simple sounds , or even act independently to react to cues in the environment. By all accounts, all animal companions and familiars should freely be in their own initiative - but they aren't, because that would be annoying and bog down 5e's gameplay, which is against its own design goals.

Ranger is widely considered the worst-designed class in the game and the class which got the least improvement in the 2024 rules. Using that to contrast something that impacts every character who uses a shield is pretty weak.

There are concessions you have to make when translating things into game mechanics. If you want to have a game where things line up more with how they are in real life, that's fine; there are games for an even harder simulationist feel. Pathfinder 2e is NOT one of those games, as it attempts to strike a balance between gameplay that evokes themes of character growth and heroism - you start slower and clunkier as a level 1 adventurer, sometimes not able to do everything you want in your turn. As you gain levels, you gain ways of lessening your clunkiness and becoming a more smooth operator in the ways your character prefers, and by the time you hit level 20 you're doing superheroics. That's its stated design goal, and it does it well. Not perfectly, mind you, but no system is perfect.

My issue is that even a high-level character in PF2 will be unable to do things a fairly average person can do without issue. That godly 20th-level fighter still only runs a 26.24-second 100 m dash, and even doubling that movement speed to 50 feet per action doesn't get you close to what a modern sprinter can do. It's stuff like this that makes even high-level PF2 characters feel hamstrung.

Because there is a long history of players ruining the fun of the game by intentionally or unintentionally using imbalances.

I honestly don't know where this idea of ​​dissociating balance from fun comes from. In the medium and long term, imbalance becomes one of the main causes of ruining the fun of a game. In fact, any type of game, sooner or later, seeks balance precisely to prevent its own collapse.

That's very clearly not the case because if it was multiplayer games would strive for balance above all else, but, PF2 aside, they very rarely make strict balance a priority. D&D is a prime example of a massively popular game with a large entrenched playerbase that doesn't care about balance. TCGs are also not balanced, with certain strategies and cards being clearly more effective than others. The most popular wargames, Warhammer 40k and BattleTech, are notoriously unbalanced even with Games Workshop taking a far more balance-focused approach to their game in recent years.

These games are all as large or larger than PF2 and show that balance does not play a huge role in how enjoyable or popular a game is.

In addition, simplifying it to "mature adults who want the same things from the experience" also places all the weight of any moment of lack of fun on the players themselves, even when they are simply trying to have fun. Imbalance affects everyone, both players who simply want to optimize and those who just want to make a character archetype to have fun, because it not only creates a significant difference between players who focus on having fun while being efficient, but also puts pressure on players who just make a character of an interesting archetype without worrying about optimization. Both are affected, the first one often trivializes the game or, if the game is balanced based on it, makes the experience difficult for others, both for those who are building a character just to create the archetype they want and end up being extremely punished for not seeking efficiency.

This entire argument has you attempting to put players who want different things from their characters into the same game. To make that work, you need to have a detailed session 0, let the flavor first players build their characters first and then tell the optimizers that these characters are their power ceiling so they should focus on building characters that optimize things that wouldn't normally make the cut in a full power anything goes campaign.

In fact, this is one of the points that my players praise PF2e for, the fact that they can build their characters however they want without worrying about whether they will be super-efficient or not, because they know that it is very difficult to create a weak and useless character even when they do not seek optimization. At the same time, the optimizing players still have fun looking for the most effective ways to use their resources and I, as a GM, can make the story progress without worrying about whether the fight will be trivialized or fatal for my players regardless of how they built their builds.

The fraction of TTRPG players who have tried and enjoyed PF2 tend to be self-selected as people who care about balance and a specific flow of tactical combat. The vast majority of people who play and run TTRPGs clearly don't care about balance enough to make the switch to PF2.

Cyberpunk is meant to be deadly, Pathfinder 2e is heroic fantasy. PCs are expected to fight against monsters in the early levels and interdimensional beings in the higher ones. I admit I only played Cyberpunk a few times but IIRC combat there is something meant to be avoided if possible, while in PF2e combat is something the players both want and expect. Its like comparing Call of Cthulhu's combat to D&D's.

Cyberpunk wants you to avoid fair fights and fights that don't obviously benefit you. You can run a game in the system where combat is frequent, but it takes a skilled hand to make it work.

Realism is IMO the worst thing that ever happened to fantasy TTRPGs, mostly because the average TTRPG player (myself included) couldn't run more than half a block without running out of steam, so what most of us think is "average" fitness is far from being the real average.

TTRPG devs really ought to base movement speeds on athletes. Monks should be based on spinters, while a barbarian or fighter could be based on modern soldiers or NFL players. Then you'd have non-athletic classes being comparatively less mobile and less able to sustain their relatively meagre top speed. This in turn would mean that squishy classes that dump physical stats need their front line to protect them lest they be overrun and easily taken down.

TTRPG players think that spending 2 seconds (the amount of times that it takes to make 1 action) to put some bandages on someone can heal the damage from getting stabbed in the chest multiple times just fine, but if you want your high level martial to put a dent on the fabric of reality then that's too much.

I have often argued that TTRPG heroes should be able to do everything a skilled warrior can do and then some. PF2 is especially egregious in making your characters worse than we would expect them to be in terms of flexibility in maneuver, use of skills, and movement.

TTRPGs should embrace unrealism because the very concept of fantasy adventurers that fight monsters or interdimensional beings who come from multiple species and have varying capabilities that range from being weapon masters to consolidated spell-slingers is in itself a unrealistic concept. No human on earth can wrestle with a polar bear, but in PF2e a group of low level characters can.

You can embrace superheroic fantasy and verisimilitude simultaneously. All it takes is making sure you don't run into issues where your god slaying warrior is worse than an IRL schlub at very basic tasks.

I mean, in reality a single good hit is usually enough to kill. And a bad hit is often enough to disable, or at least remove someone from a fight.

All of that is terrible for an RPG, unless you love for a random hit to kill your character.

I play Cyberpunk 2020, where that is already the case, and that game isn't any less fun for having combat be a deadly thing that should be avoided unless one has a serious advantage. There are also games like the Riddle of Steel, which can be even more brutal but that brutality isn't what makes them unfun; TRoS sucks because resolving attacks in pen and paper is clunky as heck.

RPG-Geek wrote:

It also doesn't address the other ways in which PF2 makes even high level martial characters play like chumps.

Have you ever actually played a high level martial? Because "Play like chumps" are not the words that I'd use to describe the whirlwind of death that a high level martial actually is.

Any character that needs a feat to do something a first month HEMA guy or novice martial artst will already being doing naturally - for example raising and blocking with a shield, firing a longbow directly, or entering a stance as part of making a strike - is playing like a chump regardless of their actual impact on the battlefield. The idea that any of these things should cost feats or actions is patently silly.

RPG-Geek wrote:

A skilled Fighter in PF2 takes an action to change between cutting and thrusting

versatile doesn't take an action. Modular does, but thats like twisting knobs and doing things no actual weapon does IRL

My bad, but even a modular or combination weapon taking an action to change sucks given how often the juice isn't worth the squeeze. It also doesn't address the other ways in which PF2 makes even high level martial characters play like chumps.

JiCi wrote:

Except that a Fighter who picked the Sword group cannot apply the Versatile trait on all associated weapons... or getting rid of the Volley trait on all Bow weapons... or adding the Jousting trait to all Spear weapons.

... You're describing the Inventor now, you realise? Why would the a weapon master add more traits to weapons, instead of having feats that key off the existing traits on weapons like, IDK, the Fighter?

Also, they can already get rid of volley, it's called Point Blank Stance. Do you actually read the Fighter before you make such weird complaints?

IRL a hand-and-a-half cut and thrust sword in the hands of a not exceptionally skilled user can cut, thrust, bind, parry, shift between one and two hands, and shove without any loss of tempo. With a loss of tempo it can also bludgeon and trip.

A skilled Fighter in PF2 takes an action to change between cutting and thrusting and uses a shield worse than a beginner at an SCA event much less a HEMA practitioner. There's room to just give characters abilities that an average weekend warrior can employ after a few hours of practice.

There's also the fact that longbowmen didn't volley fire and tended to make aimed directly fired shots. Nobody worthy of being labeled proficient with a longbow should deal with anything so ill informed as a volley penalty.

RPG-Geek wrote:

One thing that PF2 could steal from D&D is weapons having secondary effects, with fighters being the masters of using those secondary effects. I know that PF2 has critical effects and that Fighters are the best at scoring critical hits. Still, a system where every attack has a minor effect attached to it would make "just" swinging a weapon each round feel more engaging without adding a lot of extra overhead or decision-making to the game.

It's funny how perspective colors the relationship of different game systems.

Because where you are saying that PF2 could take a particular thing from D&D I am seeing a thing which D&D just recently "we'll do that too"'d from PF2 because the it's-not-a-new-edition D&D "weapon mastery" details are basically just a take on PF2's weapon traits and critical specializations blended together (and then made artificially limited so that gaining more as you level up can be presented as if it were a meaningful benefit even though you already picked the most relevant and/or can swap out for the most relevant options at regular intervals).

PF1 and 2 both took the weapon traits idea wholesale from D&D 3.x. 3 x also had stuff like harpoons that could stick into foes and allow them to be dragged around the battlefield until it was removed. The idea of a weapon that can do more than just attack is straight from the OGL. Expanding that to more effects is something that was bound to happen and that had already happened in CRPGs well before PF2 used them.

The difference between the current D&D implementation and PF2 is that PF2 wants to action tax you for everything to the point of making characters feel less skilled a fluid in combat than a guy who does HEMA on weekends. It shouldn't cost tempo to use a shield properly or make a thrust with a cut and thrust sword. Nor does it make sense that slowing somebody with a weapon should take an extra action after the attack has already landed.

PF2 would be a better game if it removed some clunky action taxes without destroying its bslance.

RPG-Geek wrote:

One thing that PF2 could steal from D&D is weapons having secondary effects, with fighters being the masters of using those secondary effects. I know that PF2 has critical effects and that Fighters are the best at scoring critical hits. Still, a system where every attack has a minor effect attached to it would make "just" swinging a weapon each round feel more engaging without adding a lot of extra overhead or decision-making to the game.

Plenty of weapons do have special effects, though, tied to traits. Razing weapons cut through shields like butter, weapons with "maneuver" traits (Shove, Trip, etc.) let you use that maneuver with that weapon's item bonus. Hampering lets you use an action to slow the target by 10 feet after scoring a hit. Parry weapons let you get a buckler-like bonus to your AC when you Raise them.

Plus, a good chunk of Fighter's feats are allocated to secondary effects on Strikes already. They already sorta *do* this. Oh, you hit with this Strike? That guy's Grabbed now. You hit a Strike on a Fightened foe? They're Off-Guard now. You hit someone with your ranged weapon? Your next ally gets a +1/+2 to hit them. Oh, you missed with this Strike? No MAP penalty because you can follow-through properly.

Weapon traits an special abilities are hardly new to or unique to PF2. AD&D had variable attack speeds and different damage values against different sized creatures and D&D 3.0 invented the current keyword weapon traits system that PF1 and now PF2 use. Maneuver weapons have existed since at least 3rd edition D&D and hardly count as an ability given that those maneuvers are literally the entire reason why those weapons are designed the way they are.

The other stuff like hindering that costs an action in PF2 is an automatic part of scoring a hit with a weapon in D&D 2024. Fighting styles give bonuses to various things, including AC, when used with specific types of weapons. The fact that these bonuses are automatic make them feel far nicer to use that PF2's system where *everything* is an action.

One thing that PF2 could steal from D&D is weapons having secondary effects, with fighters being the masters of using those secondary effects. I know that PF2 has critical effects and that Fighters are the best at scoring critical hits. Still, a system where every attack has a minor effect attached to it would make "just" swinging a weapon each round feel more engaging without adding a lot of extra overhead or decision-making to the game.

Judging by the playtest forum and lack of discussion on the PF2 sub-Reddi,t these classes seem to be a miss for most of us.

Errenor wrote:

JiCi wrote:

Let me ask you guys this: Back in P1E, has "Automatic Racial Weapon Proficiency" broken games and rules?

This is just so extravagant on several levels: you ask in a PF2 topic for comparison with PF1, and it seems even with some variant rule. There shouldn't be many people who know. Of those almost nobody would care.

Also, yes, it's bad. For PF2 at least. Already was written above why by Tridus and Easl.

Actually, I was asking that question, because I feel like it broke the game back in P1E, which is why they removed it in P2E.

Did they though? Caring about a specific weapon in the first place implies that you're not a spellcaster and thus not breaking the game by PF2 standards. When I think of what's broken in PF1 it's rarely a guy swinging a weapon.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I don't know that DPR is attacked on this forum, but as a person who has been under attack many times for being combat focused, that does happen on these forums. If your group is more combat focused and prefers a combat focused game including min-maxing for combat, then you'll definitely find a vocal group resistant to that type of gaming.

It's not the whole forum or anything, but a vocal minority who don't care for that type of game or viewing game balance and rules through that focus.

From the other side of the debate, what I find myself arguing against is not 'hey, I personally like combat centered games'.

Usually it is someone coming along saying something like:

'This feat is terrible because it doesn't do much in combat. Why did the developers even write this?'

'This weapon is a bad choice because there is this other weapon that exists and has almost the same traits, but has a bigger damage die size.'

'Why do we even have to pay for skill feats? Why not just get all the skill feats automatically other than the small handful of ones that actually have a purpose in combat?'

So there is also a vocal minority that are resistant to the idea that there is any type of gaming other than combat centered and will view all game balance and rules through that focus.

The issue is that most tables are far more strict about the rules in combat than they are outside of it and a GM rarely ends in a TPK because you failed a skill check. Thus the balance ends up focused on combat because in the vast majority of cases, it's the only spot where that balance matters.

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

The problem that people have with the Fury Instinct is that not only is it lacking in any unique mechanics, as you would expect, but it is also the weakest at the level of shared Barbarian mechanics, and to compensate, it gets... nothing.

Although I enjoyed RPing my fury barbarian, I demonstrated 6 levels of advantage for my playstyle that was only possible with fury and that had advantages over the other subclasses.

Unique advantages of my build:
1) Allowed demoralize without sacrificing the sole L1 Barb feat - This is a strong advantage for the lizard folk's Threatening Approach [two-actions] Effect: You Stride to be adjacent to a foe and Demoralize that foe. If you succeed, the foe is frightened 2 instead of frightened 1.
2) Allowed for darkvision and acute scent 30' by L2 - Impossible for any other subclass without sacrificing Sudden Charge or their L1 feat choice.
3) Grants STR dmg bonus to Athletics maneuvers (a focus of the build) via L6 feat almost impossible for other subs to acquire. Reactive Strike is more common when not getting the L6 Barb capstone. RS is also an early option for this build.
4) d8 dmg + versatile PSB + free hand + shield + 2-target attack (0 map, +1 circ). No AC penalty. Not possible with giant (requires weapon so either no free hand or no shield).

Unique advantage of Fury in general:
1) Only class in the game that can start with up to three L1 class feats.

Folks are making it a point to mark it as unequivocally sub-optimal, but it's not true. The extra feat enables build combos with your ancestry and archetypes that are not possible with the higher damage mod subclasses. P2 is widely acclaimed for unique combinations hitting above their Dmg mods. For players interested in building something unique, it has a distinct advantage.

The issue here is that you built that character to be as effective as possible within a box you artificially placed around them. Another Barbarian built without those self-restrictions is simply going to contribute more. This likely won't make much odds but in a severe encounter played by a GM that doesn't pull punches, I'd rather have Deriven's build in my party than yours.

Balance doesn't care about your fluff, it cares about the math and your character doesn't math as hard as it could.

That sort of falls in line with my thinking above. A blowgun is a light (and relatively small) weapon so it makes sense that it might be able to drawn unobtrusively. However, even though a javelin is also a light weapon, javelins are generally long weapons. At least the kind of javelin I'm familiar with, so I wouldn't allow that to be drawn inconspicuously. Even atlatl darts that I'm familiar with are so long that I wouldn't allow them to be drawn unobtrusively.

I don't think bulk alone is good enough guidance.

Although...maybe in the sense of "throwing your players a bone" you just allow anything of Light bulk even if some items don't really fit in my mind.

If you're out of line of sight when you draw it there's a good chance that an IRL guard wouldn't even notice the end of a javelin sticking out past a desk or pillar. Unless you're actively looking for something people are remarkably change blind and prone to flat-out ignoring things they don't expect to see.

I'd generally err on the side of the player trying to be stealthy in light of the very real examples of how often people fail to see things.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Did you miss the part where I stated: "Beyond being a class that can create expected outputs for a TTRPG..." I acknowledged that the Necromancer has valid outputs as a game piece. What hasn't been explained is the in-universe utility of the Necromancer and its thralls. Where does the Necromancer class fit into a version of the game where we look at things as realistic developments of a field of study rather than as a collection of game rules?

I'm not sure if my tone came across incorrectly, but I intended it as a casual "oh, and there's also that" kind of reply. I suppose the utility would be not being constantly pursued by psychopomps and not being hated by the deity that judges the dead. However, as you can see in my thread about who would want to be a necromancer, I belong to the camp that believes if you don't want to anger those entities, it makes far more sense not to become a necromancer in the first place. Therefore, I can't really answer that question.

Having read that thread I think we agree more than we disagree. Though I'm not sure we should embrace the idea of a Necromancer who seems almost ashamed of what they're doing. It would be a stronger class theme if we have a Necromancer that was a capital-N, say it with their whole chest, Necromancer rather than one that could easily be flavoured as an Oozemancer, Fungomancer, Trap Setter, or whatever else might place unmoving easily broken tokens to activate other class abilities.

Unicore wrote:

I don’t really think the Runesmith is built on a martial chassis.[...]

This is not an open question.

If the term martial is to have any meaning, it needs to mean something.

Runesmith chassis has martial weapons training, accuracy/proficiency progression, and weapon specialization. This is what "martial chassis" means.

Again, Paizo playtested the Guardian as a new "lesser martial" that had martial weapons, but also had the same lagging progression of Alchemist.

It is clear that the Runesmith chassis *is* a "full martial," and that Paizo intended for Runesmith to be more Strike-based than the Guardian.

.

While proposed maximizations of RS's damage would doubtless be impractical in real combat, we have seen that, in large part thanks to Etching, it is incredibly simple to do rather silly damage so long as one party member is melee.

New classes in PF2 have to break rules otherwise they might as well be just an archetype for an existing class. A martial class that divests itself of defences to get a better offence and a strike that it can use if needed is an interesting design space. The balance of the Runesmith needs some work to achieve this balance, but the idea itself is a fine one for the developers to have.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Let's follow this thought experiment a little further.

1) Beyond being a class that can create expected outputs for a TTRPG, what utility do the Necromancer's class features offer to the would-be Necromancer that can't be gained by studying as a Wizard?

2) Assuming there is any utility to the class for the average non-adventuring Necromancer, what is the end goal of the class's in-universe development? We don't see any improvements to the stability or utility of the summoned thralls as the class gains levels.

The idea of flying under the radar as a Necromancer would make some sense if there were actual utility to the class or if the Thralls created began to better emulate the permanent undead they were designed to replace, but flatly we don't see that. The class uses them to solve ever more difficult combat puzzles and that's it.

The lack of utility that the Necromancer class fantasy usually gains from their undead lackeys makes this class a poor fit for any Necromancer that would use their undead out of combat.

Looking at this from a game design perspective, it seems to me that this class aims to allow players to be minion masters while also addressing the complaints against necromancers from previous editions.

Three problems were already solved by turning Animated Dead into a summoning spell, which addresses the upkeep and tracking issues, as well as the concerns about using corpses and being around a army of rotting bodies.

The only remaining issues are long turns and souls. By making the undead into spirits or something similar, and by removing alignment, they somewhat "solve" the soul issue. However, the problem arises with how they attempted to address the long turn issue.

Essentially, by making it so the undead can't move or attack—effectively turning them into static objects that can be used to cast certain spells—they ensured that no time will be spent on them. Since these undead will be constantly sacrificed, optimal players will likely have few of...

Did you miss the part where I stated: "Beyond being a class that can create expected outputs for a TTRPG..." I acknowledged that the Necromancer has valid outputs as a game piece. What hasn't been explained is the in-universe utility of the Necromancer and its thralls. Where does the Necromancer class fit into a version of the game where we look at things as realistic developments of a field of study rather than as a collection of game rules?

I mean, the original point that was objected to could be rephrased as:

"It's entirely plausible that the tradition of Necromancy as represented by the class specifically developed over time in order to avoid attention from villagers with torches and pitchforks, or nastier powers entirely. It's the sort of manipulation of the energies of death and life that's not likely to attract attention you want from anybody who protects those boundaries, whereas "creating permanent undead" and the like is much more likely to attract attention from well above your weight-class, so it shouldn't really be something inherent to the class.

Like the ritual to create permanent undead and the undead master archetype are still available to you.

Let's follow this thought experiment a little further.

1) Beyond being a class that can create expected outputs for a TTRPG, what utility do the Necromancer's class features offer to the would-be Necromancer that can't be gained by studying as a Wizard?

2) Assuming there is any utility to the class for the average non-adventuring Necromancer, what is the end goal of the class's in-universe development? We don't see any improvements to the stability or utility of the summoned thralls as the class gains levels.

The idea of flying under the radar as a Necromancer would make some sense if there were actual utility to the class or if the Thralls created began to better emulate the permanent undead they were designed to replace, but flatly we don't see that. The class uses them to solve ever more difficult combat puzzles and that's it.

The lack of utility that the Necromancer class fantasy usually gains from their undead lackeys makes this class a poor fit for any Necromancer that would use their undead out of combat.

I feel like the way to make striking and tracing interact well on a martial chassis would be to give runes a weaker invoked effect and a stronger invoked when struck effect. So you could trace and invoke runes and get a decent baseline, but tracing and striking to activate the effects would give a greater reward. It never goes so far as to force a rotation, but it does strongly suggest that trace/trace/strike or trace/strike/move would be good ideas.

It's tough to see the 4 traditions of magic as a good pillars of design when we're having this much debate about an iconic type of spellcaster with a very easy-to-assign list of spells. A Necromancer's spell list should be an easy slam dunk, but the inability to narrow down a caster's list of spells has led to debate and discord and will surely lead to friction for the entirety of this class's existence.

He's 100% someone that made a fleshy golem [like Charnel Creation], not an undead.

Have you read the novel? The "monster" had free-will, the capacity for love, and was cursed only in having a creator that wasn't capable of the same. Life was properly created in that lab.

I think you are making the umbrella WAY, WAY too big for a single class. What you call pigeonholed, I'd call a selection of reasonable and popular themes. Raising dead, healing, making golems, divinations... I think you have to have realistic expectations about what ONE class can do.

You could do all of these with a PF1 Cleric who went down the path of necromancy and took the right crafting feats to make a golem.

R3st8 wrote:

A lot of people may disagree with me, but I believe a necromancer should have abilities like healing and raising the dead. What kind of necromancer can't revive people? People have become too accustomed to the Diablo necromancer and have forgotten that the whole point of being a necromancer is to resurrect the dead.

I think the fantasy is making undead and not raising the dead. I can't think of any fantasy where a necromancer is reviving people. Or healing non-undead. the healer/cleric fantasy is to heal and raise/revive people. If a necromancer tries to raise someone, I'd expect them to come back like pet cemetery.

Dr. Frankenstein is 100% a necromancer who created life, not un-life. If the OG doesn't fit the class the class is missing something.

In universe explanations tend to suck, tbh. D&D's done more damage to its settings trying to explain their retcons than with the actual retcons.

I disagree. I like internally consistent fantasy universes that stick heavily to their internal logic. If something major changes, we should eventually see why it changed.

If the magus is using out of class focus spells and sure strike to spell strike, then we are talking about only spell striking every other round and burning actions on recharging, right? Not even the starlit spam magus is spell striking with sure strike every round. I don’t think the magus damage math is as effected by the change to sure strike as people are making it out to be.

If your character has a hero point as well (a resource you only burn on a miss), spell striking g with sure strike on round 1, then using a hero point if you miss on your second/third rounds while using conflux focus spells is going to be much better damage output than repeatedly sure striking out of class focus spells.

Most people seem to prefer holding their hero points for failed saves rather than burning them for a bit of extra damage. So this is effectively asking a magus to give up defense for offense in a way they didn't have to before.

It would indeed be nice to see some weaker options get buffed without having to homebrew.

But there is a limit to available time, ressources and printing space that paizo has to work with.

Stuff that are blocking potential design spaces like how potent True Strike/Sure Strike was (at least from the point of view of the devs, you don't have to aggree) can be more of a priority to change to allow for more options of higher power later.

IF this nerf/rebalance of Sure Strike means future attack spells will be more potent to compensate for their lower accuracy, I'll take that trade.

Now, I really want to see more attack spells lol, my Magus needs options that aren't people repeating to multiclass into psychic or cleric for their focus spells lol

We'll need to wait and see if Sure Strike being changed impacts the release rate and overall strength of spell attacks. I'm not going to hold my breath though.

If these wrrata changes are meant to balance the game why are there always so many too good options nerved but very rarely any utterly awful options buffed? Balance is a two way street and while it might be more pressing to fix outliers that are breaking encounter balance, like a certain dedication that will remain for another six months, it should also go the other way and fix spells and feats that are actively hurting characters that use them. Until that happens errata will tend to feel bad as it will "break" characters that people enjoy playing without equally fixing other characters that could use the help.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Golem were widely considered to be a poor fit for PF2 and have been redesigned to solve this problem.

I will note that "literally nothing the Kineticist does can affect a Will O' Wisp" is something that survived both the Kineticist playtest and the remaster.

I'm not a fan of that or sneak attack immune enemies either. That kind of class-punisher enemy isn't the style of game that PF2 is or should aspire to be. There are places where classes should shine or take a step back, but shutting off high-budget features entirely is worth avoiding.

The last thing PF2 needs is another interesting class that ends up a chore to play due to poor action efficiency. I'd rather see a drop in burst damage than a crippled class stuck with a fixed two round action loop.

Lots of melee martials can't fly. Its not built into most classes at all, you need some other way to get it and throughout a lot of the game (including the levels most people play at), those aren't really options except "get a caster to know that spell and spend their turn enabling me."

At those same levels flying enemies are a rarity at higher levels it becomes relatively cheap to grab an item to enable flight. They have ways to solve the issue at levels where it becomes an issues, the Necromancer, as currently tested, has no way to bring a main feature to bear in that situation.

Hell, what does a caster do against a Golem when they don't have the right kind of spell for that specific Golem? This type of stuff is already a thing that happens and players have to adapt. Having thralls conjured up that somehow just float in the air is just completely absurd sounding.

Golem were widely considered to be a poor fit for PF2 and have been redesigned to solve this problem.

Thralls could easily be flavored as spectral when in flight and as bloated drowners when in water.

There will be situations when "I spam thralls" isn't the best option. Use your other abilities. If the class is really so totally dependent on thralls that they must work against every enemy no matter what and that means we just need to bake levitation into them now, then the class design is flawed and needs a rethink.

The issue isn't that they're dependent on thralls, it's that thralls are roughly half their class budget and rendered entirely worthless in fairly common scenarios. It would be nice to have a workaround even if it's inefficient like adding a second action to the normal thralls summoning action or requiring a feat to share movement buffing spells with thralls.

So is the early Summoner in the same boat?

Yeah. Classes should have ways to bring their primary feature into different environments and those ways should come online around when the fly spell becomes available.

Level 7 is when limited flight is first available via spell effects, etc.

Level 9 or 13 has some ancestries gain flight abilities, and are (give or take) the levels where you get items like Cloak of the Bat or the Winged rune that help with flight.

Level ~12 is when you start seeing stuff like Dragon Barb getting wings, and martial class options to solve flight.

I'm aware of when things come online. Level 7 is when a melee martial can, with help, contribute with their melee damage against a flying enemy.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to allow a 2-action ability to give your thralls the ability to hover in place at around that level. Like I said, it doesn't have to be an efficient option, but it should exist and level 7 wouldn't be an unreasonable place to grant it.

I'm not arguing that the class becomes useless against anything that flies, I understand that there are spells to be cast, backup weapons to be used, etc. It just seems odd that a major part of your class identity is completely unusable whenever swimming or flying foes enter the picture. Pure melee classes can fly to bring their primary means of attack to bear, but the Necromancer has no presently printed option to use their thralls on anything but a solid surface.

It would be nice to see a feat or class feature that resolves this around level 7 when characters start getting easy access to flight.

Good thing Necro is a full caster!

This is hardly a necromancer specific problem. What does a melee focused martial do in this situation? You need to use another tactic.

I don't view this as a problem. The fact that the class doesn't have one ability that solves every single problem isn't a bad thing.

A melee martial that can fly just flies up and does their thing and as such being able to fly when needed is something a martial character should invest in. Contrast this to a Necromancer who just loses an entire class feature and everything that builds off it and has no way to mitigate that loss and you can see why something, even a costly and inefficient something, would be very nice to have here.

Hello Maya, I might not be a bastion of positivity but I'm glad to see you here. Hopefully, we don't cause you too many headaches.