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I just don't see "ninja" in any media I encounter as particularly magical in nature. There doesn't seem anything inherent to the concept of "ninja" which is more about infiltration, sabotage, espionage, etc.

Like can someone explain what they think ninja is without making reference to movies, books, comics, tv shows, video games, etc.? For me the sine qua non of a ninja is "you're really sneaky" but you can already hide without even being concealed with legendary stealth. I'm willing to accept the "assassin" thing even though there's really no historical evidence of it.

Now, mind you, I absolutely believe there should be an occult wave-caster/martial hybrid to completement the Magus, but I don't think there's anything inherently "ninja" about that (it would just be yet another class you can use to play a ninja character.)

We're talking about using portrayals from Japanese media to inform the Ninja's class design. There isn't a huge reason to be authentic when the Japanese themselves are fast and loose with the idea.

We can make a solid ninja already with the existing game options but it wouldn't come on line at level 1, at least the character would need some levels in them to get the skill feats for movement and a spellcasting dedication for magic. If one were to be its own class and not a higher level archtype (which might be another way to go) then there are going to be a lot of what makes a ninja a ninja slowly given as you level.

Much of the class concept are already skill feats. Can a ninja character be a ninja if they can't do these things? And if no then would they be included in the class budget and gained at certain levels? maybe including class features that interact with jumping climbing and maybe even crawling in some way.
Skill feats like:
Quick Jump
Wall Jump
Rolling Landing
Quick Climb
Water Sprint

These are all things a Ninja should be able to spec into, but you could make a convincing Ninja that does not of them and still have it work.

Conceptually I think sneak attack is not really their thing, at least not in every way a rogue does it. For a ninja stealth feels like the key to their precision damage not off guard.

maybe the ninja's thing could be playing into conditions like concealed, hidden, undetected, and unnoticed. Maybe they gain some baseline benefit as long as they are at least concealed and get more for being hidden, and something additional for being undetected or unnoticed.

Hence, my suggestion of a set of setup conditions and then triggered attacks in bespoke self-contained packages like the Kineticist. We rarely get class support anyway, so make the best thing you can as a self-contained package and damn the consequences.

RPG-Geek wrote:

What did you think of my positioning-based hybrid of sneak attack and finishing blow as the basis for a mobile, flashy attacker that relies on set-up to dispatch foes they can't stand toe to toe with? I'd be aiming for a mechanic that goes from, "You idiot, I placed that trap there 12 seconds ago knowing you'd step on it. Now die!" to "Phew, if he'd stepped 5 feet to the side I'd be dead right now!" in the same package.

I'd be wary of too many conditionals, as it would take up a lot of page space to cover a broad range of conditions, and you'd likely run into a lot of situations where enemies just don't play along. It's essentially the Aikido problem.

But the idea itself is not bad from a flavor point, and I think you're onto something. Outsmarting prey and leading them into a trap. I'd probably suggest letting the Slayer modify the Feint action to do things other than make an opponent off guard. Say if you succeeded at feinting, you'd instead make them move 5 feet into a conveniently placed misc trap that does your choice of piercing or slashing damage, where higher tiers might instead make the trap do acid, fire, or other elemental damages. It gives you the idea of giving the appearance of a set-up, while not actually needing to plan very far ahead.

I'd be fine if Ninja were a Kinetiscist-level unicorn using page space that might have gone to spells on unique set-ups and payoffs that get combined on the fly to make a combat loop.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Is a top-down anime-inspired design the best way to ensure this class finds its audience? Do we want to pigeonhole the Ninja as the weeb class?

I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I just think it might make more sense to find their one unique thing and build from that and then dress it like a Ninja once the core works.

You are right, we want something more general, and a hook. That is the question. Lets take a look at its contenders

-First is the Rogue. The Rogue is a good thief, it is often your connection to the black market. The rogue is a face, a dilettante, a fence, a rake. The rogue is an opportunist, and its big thing is of course, sneak attack. It works on anyone who is off-guard.
-Second is the ranger. The ranger is our closest to a bounty hunter. The ranger can target a single person and focus on them. They are a good tracker too, but the base ranger needs to see the prey first before they can get bonuses on tracking, unless they are a Bounty Hunter, too. But while a ranger can act as a bounty hunter, they have a lot more support toward being a monster hunter in flavor.
-Third is the Operative, particularly the Striker Operative, which focuses on using light weapons, unarmed attacks, and ranged weapons to deal with a single target that you can designate your aim at to do a small amount of additional precision damage. Though this is a Starfinder class, and is less likely to be allowed in Pathfinder space.

I'd say that if there is one thing this class can do, it's that it can trade off things the others don't need. From the rogue, it'd want the connection to the criminal underworld, the use of underhanded tactics like poisoncraft, but it does not need to be a dilettante, it does not need all of the rogue's class feats and trainings, nor does it need to be a face. So it does not need the generalized reaction of a sneak attack, nor the defense against being ambushed that a rogue has with its Deny Advantage ability. From the ranger, it would want an ability to mark a...

What did you think of my positioning-based hybrid of sneak attack and finishing blow as the basis for a mobile, flashy attacker that relies on set-up to dispatch foes they can't stand toe to toe with? I'd be aiming for a mechanic that goes from, "You idiot, I placed that trap there 12 seconds ago knowing you'd step on it. Now die!" to "Phew, if he'd stepped 5 feet to the side I'd be dead right now!" in the same package.

In regards to an attack booster, my first thought would be that a ninja probably does not need a sneak attack. A rogue is reactionary and opportunistic, a ninja on the other hand probably would lead toward an assassination of a high value target, which would take the form of an ambush, or if we wanted to get shounen with things, a duel. As such, I'd probably sooner inspire from the Assassin's Mark for Death, the Operative's Aim, and the Ranger's Hunt Prey abilities, but more particularly, the 1E Slayer's Studied Target ability, to let the ninja focus on a single target, rather than being able to react to every off-guard opportunity.

As for spellcasting, a ninja would probably be a squishy martial like a rogue would be. It is an option to give it focus spells, but I think a ninja wants to do too much for focus spells to satisfy. On the other hand, a ninja does not need so many spells that it needs a full 3-slot allotment. And lastly, not everyone wants to be a ninja that casts spells, so while a magi's spell slot is an option, I would not recommend it for a ninja. I'd suggest following after both the Ranger and the Bloodrager Barbarian, where you can choose to opt into magic with feat choice. As such, I'd propose granting it the ability to choose a Basic Ninjutsu feat at level 1, which grants 2 cantrips and basic spellcasting benefits, an Expert Ninjutsu feat at level 12, which grants expert spellcasting benefits, and a master ninjutsu feat at level 18, which grants master spellcasting benefits. The spellslot allocation of archetype spellcasting will give a ninja a lot of ammunition to play with various kinds of magic within an encounter, but not so much that they can just use ninjutsu willy nilly. Arcane I think is probably one of the better choices for an arcane school, as it gives a wide variety of both stealth and flashy abilities, though it does leave out healing. Occultism is an option that enables healing, but it lacks the flashiness that a Naruto fantasy might invoke. This would not be an archetype...

Is a top-down anime-inspired design the best way to ensure this class finds its audience? Do we want to pigeonhole the Ninja as the weeb class?

I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I just think it might make more sense to find their one unique thing and build from that and then dress it like a Ninja once the core works.

What if the Ninja's thing was having very specific setups needed to pull off special high-damage moves? Like finishers and sneak attacks had a child.

You might have a move that works when you're between 10 and 30 ft. from an off-guard foe. A move that works on a prone foe. A move that works if the enemy didn't move last round, or was forced to move last round.

The loop would be planning ahead to chain one special move into the next, and using mobility and one-action tricks to try to ensure that happens as often as possible?

Would you mind Samurai talk moving here as well, or should I start a new thread?

M:tG has to have rulings in the giant PDF for those cases

Coming back to this, they also have the Gatherer with specific rulings for each card, so you can often just look at those for the cards in question and see if anything might resolve differently than normal based on that.

Magic has tighter rules, better FAQ style rulings, and better developer transparency than PF2/Paizo.

At high level a Cleric is a Wisdom-based full caster with lots of Hit Points, nearly the same AC as a Druid that opted into heavy armor, a spell list that at that point is incredibly versatile, with strong focus spells and strong feats as well... but also granted spells from their deity, crit specialization on their deity's favored weapon, and six 10th-rank slots from their divine font. There absolutely is room in the Druid's power budget at high level, and again precisely because they have all of the benefits you mention at low level and still get to have stronger stats. If the unique benefits they got for free at level 1 somehow got stronger at higher levels, then sure, that's how they'd scale... but from the looks of it, the opposite is true. At high levels, untamed form becomes less effective, not more, and so by your own admission. The Druid's blasting isn't as special when every caster can use their spell list to blast, certainly not when the Druid lacks many feats to boost their blasting. Their healing also doesn't get better as they level up either, and their weapon-based gish potential falls off much sooner too. It's all great in the early game, but at high levels, and for all the commitment you have to put into all of these things, it's just... less? Not bad by any stretch, especially because you still get to do a little bit of most things, but less special than it is at earlier levels.

Meanwhile, the Druid has great versatility due to their many forms, better armour, and a slightly better spell list. There isn't a huge amount of budget for casters, and most casters tend to be 90%+ spell casting by the end game. The Druid is a very solid class well into the end game, and any attempt to give them more is likely to unbalance them.

Your complaints about the Druid seem like poorly thought-out, theory crafting and some desire for "fairness" rather than anything born out of actual play experiences. Play in a one-shot that starts at 15 and runs to twenty with a party that has a Druid and Cleric, and come back and tell us where you see pain points with the Druid.

With how many interactions there are in a game this big, ambiguity and edge cases are going to happen. As has been shown, even M:tG has it and has to have rulings in the giant PDF for those cases, despite the effort they put in to avoid it and how the game is more limited in scope of what interactions are actually allowed (there is no exploration mode in it, for example).

MtG has vastly more interactions than PF2 and, unlike PF2, is Turing-complete, so you could technically have a deck of MtG cards simulate a game of MtG Arena. That is as close as we can reasonably get to infinite complexity within a game without some metatextual game where the point of the game is to continually add rules to the game. As PF2 isn't this sort of game, and MtG shows that you can make rules to cover a Turing-complete game, there isn't an issue here.

To avoid rules bloat, a TTRPG going with an MtG style system would naturally seek to avoid the edge cases that create said bloat. This isn't hard, as PF2 rarely has chains of actions longer than two or three, and doesn't have things like Morph, which are special actions that don't use the stack. It also lacks any zone that isn't the battlefield, doesn't need rules for upkeep, hand size, shuffling your deck, drawing cards, exiled objects, etc. Removing these things and knowing that you're designing for a TTRPG and not a TCG means you can cut a lot and thus reduce the interactions that would inflate a 20 to 100-page rules document into a 300-page tome.

Things like exploration can have the actions themselves codified, and then the rules can say something like, "Any strictly narrative action that doesn't involve a dice roll, another action as defined by the game's rules, or a bonus or penalty to a future action, is freeform and not subject to the rules in this document." You don't need rules to cover things that already don't interact with the rules.

This isn't some impossible challenge. It doesn't remove your ability to RP. It doesn't remove the need for a GM. There's a lot of fearmongering that seems very defensive and conservative. Many objections here seem to be along the lines of, "I like the game as it is and fear any change may harm my enjoyment of the system". This forum loves to tell people we can always just play PF1 of 3.x or some other system, but doesn't seem ready to accept that they may dislike PF3 and be forced to keep playing PF2 long after it's no longer supported by Paizo and has an ageing and dwindling player base.

Mtg is a bad comparison to a cooperative RPG. The purpose of MtG is not to collaboratively tell a story with your friends, but compete against them until one person is victorious over everyone else. The rules of MtG serve a completely different function than they do for a TTRPG.

There's also Gloomhaven, which is getting a TTRPG treatment, and which also has keywords, compartmentalised abilities, and zero ambiguity. There's also D&D 4e. There's also Lancer.

Also, please don't miss that I have now said this twice and will say it a third time:

"I'm also pushing my stance to an extreme to show that even at the far end of what anybody would do for a TTRPG, it isn't an unreasonable burden to place on the writing team."

MtG is the far end of what you could do. I'd like it, but I understand that others wouldn't. I think, with the benefit of hindsight, 4e had the right idea, and PF2 could benefit from being more like it.

I saw mention of how 4e splits descriptive text and mechanics, and it made me realize I've never looked at 4e in my life, so I went and looked at a few examples. All I'm going to say, is that I want literally anything other than that for Pathfinder, it took me a few seconds to even realize the descriptive text was there in the first place.

This is how the old 3.x Monster Manual did things. Stats, flavour text, descriptions of abilities. 4e just made a slightly different template.

As published, it used this format:

Righteous Brand - Cleric Attack 1

You smite your foe with your weapon and brand it with a
ghostly, glowing symbol of your deity’s anger. By naming one of
your allies when the symbol appears, you add divine power to
that ally’s attacks against the branded foe.

At-Will ✦ Divine, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC

Hit: 1[W] + Strength modifier damage, and one ally within
5 squares of you gains a power bonus to melee attack rolls
against the target equal to your Strength modifier until the
end of your next turn.

Increase damage to 2[W] + Strength modifier at 21st level.

My proposed change would be to change it to:

Righteous Brand - Cleric Attack 1

At-Will ✦ Divine, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC

You smite your foe with your weapon and brand it with a
ghostly, glowing symbol of your deity’s anger. By naming one of
your allies when the symbol appears, you add divine power to
that ally’s attacks against the branded foe.

Hit: 1[W] + Strength Modifier Damage, and one Ally within
5 squares of you gains a Power Bonus to Melee Attack rolls
against the Target equal to your Strength Modifier until the
end of your next Turn.

Increase Damage to 2[W] + Strength Modifier at 21st Level.

You move the flavour text closer to the rules text to enable the connection between the two and template it more like a current PF2 ability.

Teridax wrote:

yellowpete wrote:

That changed a bit in the remaster – the monsters actually need to perform subordinate athletics maneuvers now rather than just applying conditions with Grab, Knockdown etc. directly. If they can't, they're in trouble.

That doesn't actually change it -- you still had to perform the ability before anyway, now you just roll a check for it. The monsters could always perform that ability, as it was special-cased for them.

yellowpete wrote:

But also, from a practical standpoint, I don't think it's very common for GMs to deny their players the ability to grapple or knock over enemies while shapeshifted. At least I haven't seen it. Would in fact raise some eyebrows to do that, especially if the form was something that's inherently known to grapple things like a cave worm

If your GM is ruling that your battle form effectively has hands regardless, then for sure, you're massively buffing all battle forms, while trivializing the battle forms specifically built to let you use Athletics maneuvers like the flytrap form for plant form. For all the ambiguity in battle forms, this is one of the more clear-cut cases: Athletics maneuvers specifically state you need a free hand, and battle forms explicitly state when you have hands. When you don't, they also explicitly state when you can use Athletics maneuvers. This is less arguing on the ambiguity of those rules, and more wishful thinking.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

The majority of your posts are "sus" as you put it. You post a lot like that guy a while back who disappeared after creating a thread like this about a class that needed no help.

You sound like you don't play the game or even understand action economy. You keep listing feats with no idea how they are used.

So, just to be clear: after you claimed you logged your combats and vaunted your expertise of the Druid, after I and another user asked for you to share even just a bit of this evidence you said you'd collected,

...

I think the Druid is fine and generally respect your takes on class balance, as your playstyle often aligns with my own. I'd still like to see the logs just to see what exactly you're doing to make these classes overperform the way they seem to at your table.

Ambiguity that is easily resolved by a human referee is, or me, always preferable to having to look something up in a document. Even if two different human referees would disagree about how to resolve said ambiguity.

"Being able to play the game fast, largely from memory, so you can focus on things like storytelling, acting, and improvisation" is entirely worth table variation.

Do you think that Magic players play with the rule book beside them? Magic is a tough game to pick up, but most tables won't have a rules dispute in weeks or even months of play. The way cards are written and the cards that are commonly played simply don't lead to actual ambiguity.

Also, as I've stated clearly already:

"I'm also pushing my stance to an extreme to show that even at the far end of what anybody would do for a TTRPG, it isn't an unreasonable burden to place on the writing team."

PossibleCabbage wrote:

FWIW, the Comprehensive Rules document for Magic: the Gathering is now a 299 page PDF which does not include niceties like "art" or "anything that allows you to actually play the game." I do not think this is a model for "legibility of rules."

You are correct, you absolutely don't 'need it' outside of a competitive setting. But it does include rulings on a whole lot of ambiguity between card interactions. Like, In what order does things get put onto the stack if an action would place multiple things onto the stack at the same time, Stating that copies do not continiously update to match the original. If you play a card which causes a roll, and by some action or play that roll is to be ignored. Did the roll happen? What about state-based actions. It even has rule entries for single, unique cards.

It's smack full of tiny details that exists purely to resolve what the basic cards and rules have not.

I believe the closest we have to a similarity in pathfinder terms, is that this document is a mix between table etiquette written similar to that of a sports event, and a list of how to resolve scenarios like shield block alongside immunities/weakness/resistances because the base rules don't cover it.

Much of that wouldn't be needed in Pathfinder as abilities could be self-contained; there is no hand, library, graveyard, exile, or sideboard to worry about. No lands, no mana sources, no morph creatures, no Panglacial Worms, etc. You could cut those rules down greatly by avoiding those TCG-specific designs.

FWIW, the Comprehensive Rules document for Magic: the Gathering is now a 299 page PDF which does not include niceties like "art" or "anything that allows you to actually play the game." I do not think this is a model for "legibility of rules."

You really don't need all of that for average play, and a lot of those rules cover corner cases specific to a TCG that wouldn't be required in a simpler TTRPG. You have turns instead of phases, people only have a single reaction so you likely don't need the specifics of the stack, many rules layers can be removed, etc.

The core of the idea is to have a thoughtful technical design with as little ambiguity as possible.

Senseless was used in the definition of the keyword Stunned. That sounds like an infinite recursion in which the rules have to define keywords in order to define keywords.

MtG does this with modern design. Certain terms include "enters the battlefield" in the reminder text for that keyword, enters the battlefield, now shortened to enters in modern formating, is a key phrase used to define a part of another keyword.

Stunned is an effect which might trigger additional keyworded statuses.

I played Magic: The Gathering so long ago that I remember when Menace was not a keyword. Instead, the ability was written out. For example, the M12 version of Stormblood Berserker said, "Stormblood Berserker can't be blocked except by two or more creatures."

Furthermore, the original Magic: The Gathering rules were sloppy at defining their keywords. I remember banding, such as on Benalish Infantry. The keyword meant that the card could band with another attacking or blocking creature so that they dealt damage and received damage together. But eventually Wizards of the Coast had to formally define banding and then they dropped it because the well-defined ability was too lengthy to explain: Banding (Any creatures with banding, and up to one without, can attack in a band. Bands are blocked as a group. If any creatures with banding you control are blocking or being blocked by a creature, you divide that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by or is blocking.)

I started playing in 2001, took some time off to come back around 2007, dropped off until 2016 or so and have played and followed since. I've seen the design team improve their technical writing and knowledge of what makes a readable, unambiguous card. I'm saying other games should borrow from these lessons.

To a certain point Paizo does keyword terms with specific meaning, We do have the capitalisation of game elements and traits in place of keywords.

I've seen the phrase "abilities do what they say they do" tossed around in these forums for several years and most people seem to take it as "if it's not written to adress a game element then that part doesn't interact with it either"

I'm also going to be absolutely honest... and say that I absolutely despise the MTG rules. The comprehensive rules document is close to 300 pages. Most of which is just saying what triggered abilities does and cornercases it might create. Most of it feeling like its weird undefined interactions that has popped up in MTG tournaments and then been added to the document as a separate ruling.

Thats alot of work on a single document, but it also feels like they have to due to the competitive nature.

You never need to read that entire document; it's mostly there to resolve exactly how two niche spells interact. The idea is that you take the basic design of MtG and its black and white, zero ambiguity rules, cut back the stuff you don't need for your game (Creatures, Artifacts, Vehicles, Sagas, Battles, Rooms, Planeswalkers, etc.) and use what's left as the basis for designing TTRPG spells and abilities.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Clear technical writing isn't that hard.

I used to write the documentation for the software that my team developed. Technical writing is hard. We mathematicians are good at making sure the documentation is complete, but perfect clarity is often beyond our scope. For example, some words have multiple meanings.

For example, we have the recent argument about the word "senseless." Words like "senseless" and "ruthless" often are not direct negations of their root words. Sense can mean a method of perception, but it can also mean thinking as in the phrase "common sense." Ruth means compassion or remorse, but we forgot that meaning so ruthless stands alone to mean without mercy. Wireless covers electronic communications that never used wires for communications, and a wireless communication device might be wired to a power source. Aimless means without purpose rather than not aiming. I happen to agree with NorrKnekten that the meaning of "senseless" is the same meaning as in the idiom "knocked senseless" which is unconscious or just short of unconscious but not blinded or deafened. But my main point is that the word is too ambiguous.

Senseless has a third meaning of lacking meaning, such as "a senseless rant." Fortunately, no-one has tried to apply that meaning to the introductory sentence of the Stunned condition.

Technical writing has to avoid such ambiguities. Which means looking at the text from a fresh viewpoint to catch alternative meanings rather than judging it from its intended meaning. That is difficult.

Which is why you keyword any terms with specific meanings.

If you define what senseless means for your game, then senseless, every time it appears, will have one and only one meaning in terms of how it interacts with the game's rules.

A good example is Menace as an MtG keyword. I common parlance it's so broad as to be effectively meaningless as a game term. In MtG it means, "Can only be blocked by two or more creatures." Lifelink, it's not even a real word and could mean a few things. In game terms, it means, "When this creature deals damage you gain that much life."

If you start by thinking of the components of your game and what needs to be defined and fill things out from there, and then treat all abilities, feats, and spells as items that must either use existing keywords, use specific language to define a bespoke ability that interacts with your rules frame work, or which breaks a rule in a very specific and clearly defined terms.

TCGs do specific technical writing well and deal with far more game pieces than a TTRPG does. D&D 4e also did it well; they missed a few infinite loops, but the rules were always clear and easy to understand. Lancer also makes its rules very clear and specific.

TheFinish wrote:

Having a situation like Stunned, or boomerangs, or what an "instance of damage" is, as well as many others, doesn't add anything to Pathfinder besides needless ambiguity that detracts from the game.

Clearly separating how the game wishes the effect to be perceived (flavor text) from what the effect actually does (mechanics text) is better for everyone. You can still run into problems with them having conflicts, but it is much easier to adjudicate, and it also makes it much easier to ignore one side or the other if you don't find it fits with your game mileu.

And it will in no way lead to GMs no longer being required, anymore than clear rules have led to MTG now only being played by computers, against computers.

Yeah one could have it like that, with a separator between the description and effect.

I won't deny that theres issues with certain weapons, Boomerangs is not one of them imo but the issue lies in that it strays to close to the mechanical language, its still part of the whole text describing what a boomerang is and not its effects. Theres nothing to really separate in the first place. If anything I wish they would stop putting rules in the weapons outside of Special entries within the text. Longbows unable to be used while mounted, while other two handed bows can? Just one of the most forgotten rules out there.

Same with instance of damage, The term appears what.. 2 times in the book and even the foundry team has said they havent gotten a straight answer as to what it means, So they are guessing... or basing it of Mark's old posts.

But for stunned? That really isn't an issue outside of knowing what a word is and "can't act" not being codified proper while still touched upon by a somewhat direct reference.

"You've become senseless. You can't act."
is the same excersice in language as
"You are incapable of movement. You can't use any actions that have the move trait." Just with a word that has a notorious disconnect in that it doesn't follow what...

Clear technical writing isn't that hard. D&D 4e did it very well; the main failing was that they did a poor job connecting gameplay to flavour. If they just went with a more classic fantasy styling for the layouts, I think that alone would have changed opinions about that edition.

Bluemagetim wrote:

I mean you’re right about MTG, a computer can run a game of MTG and resolve everything that comes up.

I would hate for Pathfinder to get so restricted in its writing and the outcomes it can provide that it becomes like a card game and it no longer needs people to GM it.

There is, in fairness, a huge gap between 'can be run entirely by computer' and 'one of the most common condition in the game has zero agreement on the mechanical impact of its first two sentences'

I'm also pushing my stance to an extreme to show that even at the far end of what anybody would do for a TTRPG, it isn't an unreasonable burden to place on the writing team.

I mean you’re right about MTG, a computer can run a game of MTG and resolve everything that comes up.

I would hate for Pathfinder to get so restricted in its writing and the outcomes it can provide that it becomes like a card game and it no longer needs people to GM it.

MtG is Turing complete and thus can be used to run code like a computer.

As for the game being boring because the rules are well-defined, I don't see it. The GM is still creating the story, players are still deciding how to interact with the world, the dice still create a sense of uncertainty, and creative plays are still possible. MtG is an outlet for both skill and creativity, and with so many cards, if you play the oddballs, there is always a chance you've just played out an interaction that nobody has ever seen before.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

Its a word used in context of being stunned meaning as not having all your faculties but i'll give you that meaning as you put it wouldn't work to mean without senses in the physical sense (albeit it wouldn't make much sense to think that was the meaning they were going for)

Taking the meaning it has to be in context and the natural language does work in this case.

Even in that context, it isn't clear what effect "senseless" should have on a creature. Can an Ooze be knocked senseless? A skeletal Undead? Neither type of monster has the CNS needed to experience shock or the brain to have a concussion. Can a senseless creature take simple instinctive actions, like continuing to punch a foe or maintain a guard, as we see happen fairly commonly in the UFC?

You see how if we follow this rabbit hole, it just leads to a mess? If senseless were a keyword with a known rules meaning we wouldn't be having this discussion about a single status effect.

Oozes are a whole nother bag of worms. Like how does one even trip them? Why does it matter to the ooze what part of its...ooze is on the floor, its all ooze. Yet you can by the mechanics of the game trip one.

Not everything makes sense when you you don't apply any reason at all to and run exact mechanics.

Unless you make the mechanics specific and detailed in their resolution, which is what people are asking for.

I can tell you what any given card in MtG will do at every single table it can be played at and in any given situation. There is zero ambiguity, and the limit to resolving the card interaction successfully is my knowledge of the rules and ability to look things up. That holds for all permutations of the ~27,000 magic cards that exist.

I cannot say this for the ~700 total spells in Pathfinder 2e Remastered. Just write spells for TTRPGs like a TCG card* and then add a piece of art or two per page and some descriptive text. MtG prints between 1,500 and 2,100 new cards per year, but culling that back to just unique instants, sorceries, and enchantments that work in a way relevant to a TTRPG, they print maybe 150 - 200 new cards per year. So it should be beyond Paizo to do the same for spells, especially considering they'd be able to use top-down design and crib off of extant TCGs to accomplish this task.

Good technical writing isn't that hard, and it drastically helps with gameplay.

*YGO is excluded because it also insists on using natural language and has ambiguity that other TCGs do not.

Its a word used in context of being stunned meaning as not having all your faculties but i'll give you that meaning as you put it wouldn't work to mean without senses in the physical sense (albeit it wouldn't make much sense to think that was the meaning they were going for)

Taking the meaning it has to be in context and the natural language does work in this case.

Even in that context, it isn't clear what effect "senseless" should have on a creature. Can an Ooze be knocked senseless? A skeletal Undead? Neither type of monster has the CNS needed to experience shock or the brain to have a concussion. Can a senseless creature take simple instinctive actions, like continuing to punch a foe or maintain a guard, as we see happen fairly commonly in the UFC?

You see how if we follow this rabbit hole, it just leads to a mess? If senseless were a keyword with a known rules meaning we wouldn't be having this discussion about a single status effect.

NorrKnekten wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

Aware but unable to act is paralyzed not stunned. Stunned is being unable to act and not being able to make sense of whats coming in, that's the senseless part.

You can act while paralyzed though only trough purely mental actions, Stunned is can't act, full stop.

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Bluemagetim wrote:

A senseless creature can act so being senseless on its own cannot mean you cannot act. It means its own thing.

Except Senseless is not a synonym to having your senses impaired but rather a synonym for unconcious or unresponsive, Which is the issue. Even if you were correct in its meaning it would still need to define what "senseless" means in game terms. Just like Blinded says a whole lot more than "You cannot see". It also says

You can't detect anything using vision.
You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see.
if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to Perception checks.
You are immune to visual effects.

It's not repeating itself just for the fun of it, This is also why conditions exists to codify and define common effects to effectively infer the same meaning elsewhere with a single word.

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Bluemagetim wrote:

In fact here you cannot act is not saying the exact words you cannot use actions yet it still means it. You are senseless means the in context most obvious meaning too.

Unlike "Senseless" we do have "You can't act" as a game term defined both in the rules regarding turns and The same thing is repeated in Gaining and Losing actions. We do not need Blindness to tell us everything that the Blinded condition contains for the same reason.

"Player Core pg. 436, Turns wrote:

Some effects might prevent you from acting. If you can't act, you can't use any actions, including reactions and free actions.

...

...

By your logic, a senseless act of violence must literally mean that the person committing violence is either doing it unconsciously or while unable to perceive their surroundings. Natural language simply doesn't work for a game's rules text.

Design spells and abilities to work as unsubjectively as an MtG card and then add a sidebar on flavour text and expanding spells beyond their strict rules framework as an optional, not PFS legal, set of variant rules.

The-Magic-Sword wrote:

It is one thing that 4e always did well with-- separating flavor text and mechanical text to make it easier to track.

See, I would count this among the worst things about 4e (an edition I liked a lot, actually)- my eyes would glaze over reading 4e spells and I'd have basically no clue about what happens when you cast the spell other than the mechanics. Like "1W + StrMod damage, Target is Pushed 1 square" is clear, but what actually happens?

Probably what the italic text above the spell says it does, or what the name suggests the spell does. It doesn't take a surplus of creativity to figure out how to have your character deliver Righteous Brand to an opponent.

Righteous Brand - Cleric Attack 1

You smite your foe with your weapon and brand it with a
ghostly, glowing symbol of your deity’s anger. By naming one of
your allies when the symbol appears, you add divine power to
that ally’s attacks against the branded foe.

At-Will ✦ Divine, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC

Hit: 1[W] + Strength modifier damage, and one ally within
5 squares of you gains a power bonus to melee attack rolls
against the target equal to your Strength modifier until the
end of your next turn.

Increase damage to 2[W] + Strength modifier at 21st level.

Claxon wrote:

Finoan wrote:

Tridus wrote:

It's completely morally bankrupt and is effectively theft.

Bankruptcy as a whole is morally bankrupt and is effectively theft. The only question is, 'theft from whom?'

But considering that the historical alternative is debtor's prison...

I wouldn't consider bankruptcy in and of itself to have moral standing.

Effectively you have more debt than you can pay, and you tell your creditors that "you're giving up". Sometimes that results in restructuring of the company and selling off assets and continuing to operate. And yes, it could be viewed as theft from your creditors, but I feel like that is the risk that creditors take. In my view, that is the risk they're taking and in the event of bankruptcy, they are the ones who should get screwed.

Also, debtors prisoners only work for individuals not corporations. But individual debtors generally aren't the problem (they don't get big enough loans to matter) for the system to fail.

The Housing Crisis of 2008 says hello. Individuals can definitely get big enough loans to create a systemic risk, usually in big ticket items like houses, education, and car loans if enough went belly up. It's all layered and flows both ways.

Single big loans by companies are often less dangerous because they have higher lending requirements than lots of smaller loans to retail borrowers buying houses and such which have lower lending standards and more government support.

Housing busts have been some of the biggest systemic risks in our history driven by smaller borrowers unable to payback mortgages as the use of credit by the public for big ticket purchases has become more common in the past 60 or 70 years.

If the price of homes, vehicles, and education weren't rising drastically faster than wages and purchasing power, these loans wouldn't be unaffordable, and people wouldn't be defaulting to the level where it causes a crisis.

This is where the rules should all be written with solid technical writing, and the italicised descriptive text should be added additionally to give some idea of what a spell or effect might look like. For things like fireball, we could even add an extra rule, something like:

"Destructive [x]

A Destructive effect has an additional effect on anything it affects that has a hardness lower than the Destructive rating of the effect."

Fireball might have Destructive 12 when cast using a Rank 3 slot, while Breathe Fire might have Destructive 4. This is a hard and fast rule for what is and isn't impacted by the spell.

Fireball might even go further and say something like:

"Flammable objects affected by this spell catch fire and turn to ash if not extinguished in 3 rounds. Objects with half or less hardness compared to this spell's Destructive level are instantly turned to ash and cannot be repaired by any rank 3 or lower spell."

Keywords are amazing, and games need to stop being afraid to use them.

YuriP wrote:

That's why I said that for me, the Skill Increases skill should actually be “you 1 plus your intelligence bonus to skill increase” instead of “you gain a skill increase”. This is because, in addition to maintaining the skill balance that we have at the beginning of the game, it would also keep the benefits of the intelligence bonus relevant over time. The game wouldn't break because it already has worked like that since the very beginning. The difficult thing to explain is the opposite, which is why the character becomes less and less skilled as he becomes stronger.

I been thinking about this and...I actually kinda took a liking for this idea, though it wouldn't be something I would tweak into the current system. Let's say you are a 4th level wizard with a +4 Int modifier. One level earlier, under this "1 + Int mod skill increases" system, you had to raise 5 skills to expert. This means that your 4th level skill feat (and possibly 3rd level general feat too) required you two sift through at least 5 skill feat lists to choose one.

I feel this is something Paizo wouldn't want players to do since PF2e is clearly designed to be more narrow in that sense. You gain an ancestry feat? You only have to look at your ancestry's feat list to make this choice. You gain a class feat? Only your class feat list. And so on. Skill feats technically allow more freedom in this sense but, to be fair, if you took an increase in a skill its very likely your next skill feat is going into a feat from that skill. Not to mention choice paralysis when you take increases into a skill that doesn't have good skill feats, but now imagine that when you took skill increases into 5 of them.

In a system in which skill feats weren't a thing (or rather most of them were baked into the different tier proficiencies of the skill itself, with the few that change too much how the skill works made into general feats) I would really like this "1 + Int mod skill increases" idea, but in the current system where I also...

Oh no, I have options for my character at each level...? What is the issue here when spellcasters have to sift through hundreds of spells at even 5th level (rank 3 spells) to pick two of them?

It doesn't help that the PF2 content creators have the charisma of stale bread. The only creator I can stand to watch that does PF2e content is Jacob from XP to Level 3, and he did a dramatisation of a test encounter he ran. The comments were all over him for a couple of rule mistakes and the encounter being too hard, even though he never presented any negativity about the system in that video.

If the PF2 community wants its flowers, we have to be better at not being a&%%$&!s when people dare to play our game and get things wrong.

Sorcerers really would make more sense as a Con-based class. Taxing their blood, literally glowing with magic as they fling spells, and they train to better resist the damage from their own power.