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If Barathu can't pause and rest in midair though... well, you get back to "my ancestral homeworld is lethal to me at level 1" issues. You go to sleep? You fall out of the sky and die. I know that simulationism doesn't get a lot of sway in the PF2 game lineage, but this really isn't great.
Got my Sub pdf and reading through and one issue that carries forward from before unless I am missing something is that there is no in class way to get more than 2 familiar abilities without taking an archetype like familiar master or Sorcerer. This kinda feels really bad given they added the homunculus specific familiar which is clearly designed for the alchemist who has no in class way to get to the required 6 abilities. I'm not sure how big a deal that is, given that Familiar Master archetype does exist. With the dedication counting as Enhanced Familiar, it's not like you're wasting feats. And a Unique ability to have a 1500 ft. Telepathic link with both sides having full access to eachothers knowledge (not sure how usefull this is without an extra ability free to give it speech so that it can relay information for you not only to you.). There are some other things too just don't if I am allowed to share the full text before release. Well, one thing it does is it lets you use it to play scout in realtime from 1500 feet away. You can discuss where it needs to go and what it needs to do and so forth. Now, you can also buy it the ability to talk, for *those* benefits, but it's by no means useless by itself.
It's not xd6, though. It's xd6+x for the splash. If you're a bomber, that becomes xd6+5 at level 5. Bombers also get to choose cold/electric/fire/acid, and at level 11 they can have it also count as adamantine/cold iron/dawnsilver, or any metal you happen to be wearing. A level 10 feat can give you another +int to that splash damage, as well as increasing splash size. At 13, bombers get to increase splash size *again*. So at level 12, the bomber slinging a versatile vial with appropriate feats is dealing 3d6+10 to the primary target, and 10 to everyone within 10 feet of the target, in their choice of four damage types, in their choice of at least three special materials. Given that the backfire mantle is a thing, and the level 8 version, delightfully, offers exactly 10 resistance to friendly splash, I'm going to say that that's a decent chunk better than the 5d6 plus some nice crit effects that you'd get out of a standard d6 ranged weapon. If you're fighting crowds, then the splash is giving you some love. If you're fighting singletons, then you weren't ever all that likely to crit anyway... and you're a *lot* better at routing around resists and into vulns than anyone with a weapon that they've actually invested in is. Pretty nice for a class that's *still* bringing heals and buff-juice to the table at the end of the day. Now, it's not nearly as good for anyone who isn't a bomber, and it requires both feat investment and some gear investment. This is true... but it's pretty solid once you've tossed those things in there, and those investments also apply in full for when you're throwing around bombs that you've made that you *can* slap additives on... like making a sticky bomb with 10 points of ongoing damage.
For the record, I'm really appreciating this thread just as a place to go for the links.
The suits at Hasbro that decided "we should alter the OGL so it benefits us more" really didn't have Paizo in their sights. I don't believe that this is correct. Like, as one of the steps in their walk-back, WotC pretty much specifically said "We're not targeting the small-time creators. We're trying to get money out of the large multi-million-dollar companies" Paizo is one of the few of those, and (as far as I'm aware) the most prominent. Also, there had prior to this been a lot of churn online about people evangelizing PF2 in 5e spaces, with some success. I absolutely believe that WotC was seeing Paizo as a competitor and that this was an effort to eat their lunch. Sure did backfire, though.
"Congratulations on your conquest of the year gone by... and good luck 0n your assault upon the year to come." Also, yay little Akiton! Hopefully it'll be the sort of interesting place inside a place full of little interesting bits and lovable characters that can be used as a touchpoint for campaigns to return to as their characters mature.
Not having those classes in the initial book would also be a huge mistake. You are incorrect. The core book has enough classes to build a solid adventuring party. You've got a class for tanks, a class for ranged DPR, a class for nonmagical support, a class for melee DPR, a heal/buff caster class and a "mess with the enemy" caster class. That's enough to set up and run a game. The game at that point is viable. Rushing the Mechanic and Technomancer before they're ready would damage those two classes. It would make them worse overall, and the damage that it would do is not the kind that's easy to fix with errata. Letting them wait has a lot of benefits. It means that they can get a bit more focus, it means that there's more feedback about how SF2 plays, it means that they get their own playtest period to work with, and it means that there will be time for the designers to set more bricks in place to support them properly. Letting them show up a year or so later than the rest will mean that we have a better Technomancer and a better Mechanic for the entire rest of SF2's lifespan. That has value. Now, you crave these classes? Okay. Sure. Fine. You won't play the game without them? Also fine. SF1 is still there, and it has gobs of stuff written for it. It's entirely reasonable to say "I'm not going to make the switch until they bring back my favorite class. There's nothing wrong with that. ...and when they do bring them back, the fact that that extra time was taken is going to mean that those classes will be more satisfying to play.
Actually, evil is still a thing. It is Evil that went away and got replaced by Unholy for PFS PC purpose IIRC.You get what I mean. With the remaster, there's no more questionning on the morality of your behavior unless you go for extreme one that will give you Infamy. So you can play a PC that would qualify as Evil in the past. In a more pragmatic sense, very little has changed. - How evil you can have your actions be is unchanged. The Infamy rules stand exactly as they were, and PFS had no other applicable enforcement. - How evil you can present yourself as outside of your actions is unchanged. If it doesn't generate infamy, then PFS doesn't address it. - Your character options and what you have written on your character sheet will have shuffled around, because the actual options themselves have shuffled around, but there's a pretty direct correspondence nonetheless. Previously, you couldn't write down that you were evil, or take the obviously evil-flagged character options. Currently, you can't write down that you're unholy, or take the obviously evil-flagged character options. Like, the only difference I can see is if you yourself cared about properly roleplaying the alignment written on your character sheet, at which point you could now write nothing and still have RP justification for considering yourself to be "evil". The rules themselves didn't change a lot, though.
That's not what PFS is about, though. PFS is about generally good people doing generally good things, and making the world (in general) a better place. So, I may have overstated. At the same time, there's the fact that evil character options aren't really allowed, and taking more than about three significantly evil acts will make you retire your character permanently. PFS does not support play as an evil character. It's not intended to. You can cram in some evilness around the edges if you work at it, but you shouldn't be surprised when your "I'm evil but it's okay" character concept isn't allowed because you were never intended to be able to play PFS as an evil character in the first place.
Perhaps Gorum refused to truly take a side and both sides were infuriated by this, so his death was simply a means to deny either side having the aspect of War behind them? That's a really weird take, since he'd almost certainly follow the same bog-standard pattern as all of he other neutral deities and let his followers go either way... and it wouldn't be in his nature to ever pick sides when he could instead revel in the carnage.
It is possible to play an unrepentantly evil character in a party and have it work, with or without hiding things from your fellow party members. It is possible to have an entire party be composed of such characters. That's not what PFS is about, though. PFS is about generally good people doing generally good things, and making the world (in general) a better place.
They're not going to add a class without playtesting it. They've learned that lesson. As such, including a class in core without including that same class in playtest would mean pausing the release of Core while they ran another playtest just for that class. That would be really very expensive in a number of meaningful ways - not just raw money. Essentially, it would be a significant mistake on their part, one way or the other, and Paizo has learned how to not make mistakes like that.
We haven't yet seen any of the curses. They could still be pretty interesting. We haven't yet seen any of the other path features of the mysteries, either. Those could also be interesting. We've lost most (but not quite all) of the bit where you could turn the downside of your curse into an upside by dancing with it, but let's be a bit patient before we conclude that all of that flavor is lost.
It goes past that. It's not just "being an awful person means you can't be holy". There's a really strong argument to be made that being unholy pretty much inherently means that you're an awful person. Like yeah, there's space for GM interpretation there, and not just houserules. The rules themselves are unclear and arguably contradictory... but "being unholy means that you're an awful human being" is, I think, one of the stronger rhetorical positions in that morass. Still, your core assertion is correct. For an individual person, the unholy sanctification functions primarily as a requirement. "You must be this evil to ride this ride". There's nothing stopping you from being whatever level of horrible with no sanctification at all. In the context of gods, however, if unholy sanctification is a hard requirement for you... then yeah. Among deities, you are, in fact, The Worst. Asmodeus and Urgathoa are simply more horrible than Zon-Kuthon and Norgorber. None of the four are what we'd describe as good, but ZK and the Hamburglar are at least willing to accept and share power with non-awful followers who are at least potentially seeking non-awful ends. For Asmodeus and Urgathoa, that's simply not true.
I was thinking that should be part of the blessed one archetype or background. Awesome. ...and now I'm imagining a version that's nearly identical other than the fact that he instead worships Pharasma specifically in her role as creator-deity. They'd work well together, but their theological debates would be legendary.
One thing to notice about Foretell Harm is that it's also another dip on the available vulnerabilities, if you were able to hit them once already.
Alright, that's it. If I get a chance I'm playing my Stout Halfling Mummy as a bones Oracle who worships Urgathoa as a liberator and provider, despite the fact that his kindness and mercy piss her off, causing his curse. ...and if there's any way at all, try and see if you can get sanctified Holy.
So the thing I notice is that "cursebound" looks like an encounter resource. Like, "take more curse" is explicitly intended as a cost, and higher-level characters are supposed to be able to get more cursed than lower-level characters. As such, I'm thinking that ones you've maxxed out your current curse level, you don't get to push it any further, and all of those shiny feats turn off until you can (somehow) get your curse to subside.
My point was more "Urgathoa should allow for non-sanctified clerics" and not "I don't understand sanctification". First of all, I honor that confusion. It's not clear. It's especially unclear because sanctification is clearly and explicitly a thing in Golarion, but the mechanisms are only vaguely implied, rather than actually explained. If you decide you want to be sanctified, what determines whether or not you are worthy? What is the method by which the sanctification is applied? If you see the error of your ways and either fall to corruption or redeem yourself, does the sanctification remain? Is there *any* way to get rid of it? Is it technically possible to be both holy and unholy at the same time? That said... I think that the best way to take it is as if it *is* a personal edict/anathema. Like, if you're sanctified Holy, then that means that you really care about helping people and opposing the forces of the hells. If you're sanctified unholy, then you really are dedicated to cruelty in some way, and also you've firmly aligned yourself with the devils and against the celestials. Now, this take really doesn't work well for the game of "How far can I twist alignment definitions/expectations". That's true. It pretty much both assumes and insists that you not do that. At this point, though, I think it's either that or houserule. We simply don't have the close-look clarity on it right now.
The Pathfinder Society is trying to save the world. Asmodeus seeks eternally to damn it. It's a bit of a conflict of interest.
Ahhh. Got it. My misunderstanding. Well, once you allow for house rules on this stuff, anything goes. Before that... I think it's more interesting to consider what it means that she doesn't allow unsanctified than to argue that it's incorrect. Like, at this point she's the most important goddess Geb has left, and she insists that her clerics must declare for a specific side in the War in Heaven. That's interesting.
Some interesting ones from Tian Xia World Guide: Hei Feng now only allows holy sanctification if you're tengu (I can't help but think it's for earning brownie points from Lady Jingxi lol), while Yaezhing went from LE/NE only followers to allowing both holy/unholy sanctification. Hmmm. Yaezhing also added an intro description that makes him a lot mroe evenhanded, and added "slaughter indiscriminately" to his anathema. The Hei Feng/Lady Jingxi thing says quite a lot in relatively few words... like how three of Lady Jingxi's anathema are basically "Be Hei Feng". It's like, he's still trying. The social toolset he's got is 100% wrong for the job, but he is trying. Hei Feng Edict: "make token attempts to apologize to those you have wronged"
5. Create a fantastic closed-room mystery about your own death?
I still maintain I could create a "good" cult to Urgathoa in Cheliax that embracess her two big points: Hunger/indulgence and Undeath. Not if you want any clerics you can't. That's the point. Clerics of Urgathoa are now *required* to show devotion to "victimizing others, inflicting harm, and battling celestial powers"... and Urgathoa is the one who required this thing. Like, you can have random whackadoos believe anything they want about whatever deity strikes their fancy. You can even have clerics delude their flocks in any of a wide variety of ways... but every cleric of Urgathoa who's actually receiving spells is a fundamentally horrible person. Basically, if Urgathoa allowed for nonsanctified clerics, I'd agree with you... but she doesn't, so I don't. Edit: On further consideration, I must acknowledge that there's a viable read where you can basically fake a sanctification - where you don't have to have devotion to "victimizing others, inflicting harm, and battling celestial powers", you just have to convince the appropriate infernal authorities that you have those things. Even so, a sect that's being run by clerics who are pretending to be awful in these ways isn't likely to be a particularly good group to hang around... and if everyone in the local leadership is faking it, they should probably be worshiping someone like Norgorber instead. Pharasma is None/HolyTypo here, she's Heal/No Sanctification. Right you are. Thought the right thing, wrote the wrong thing. Ah well. Past the edit window now. Kinda feel that Pharasma should have the harm font. Obviously you can't use it to heal under, but she is still the god of death so it would make sense for some of her clerics to finish off people who are trying for immortality... My understanding is that generally they do that by either embracing undeath or becoming gods. For undeath, she'd rather have the heal fond. The ones that try to become gods are another deity's department.
Still crossing my fingers for an eventual Darklands book for those to show up in alongside Caligni. I know James Jacobs has said no such book is on the docket at the moment, but I can hope. Darklands is huge. We're not getting a comprehensive darklands book because there's way too much of it. We are going to get little bits of darklands sprinkled around in other books (indeed, we've already gotten some of that). We might at some point get a Lost Omens book for some particularly interesting or important part of the Darklands and/or an AP that involves delving into the darklands, and thus dials in and reveals more about specific chunks of the place. The AP seems more likely than the LO, really. In particular, for a LO book to be worthwhile, it has to be an area that people really want to know about. So... we might manage a LO of the Darklands under the Inner Sea or under Avistan or something, but people would have to really want to know about that specific chunk of the darklands, and in order to have that be a thing, we'd have to have some sort of major event that made that specific chunk of the darklands more important. Actually... probably a more sane way to do it would be to split the difference. Pick a spot on the map that has an unusually high degree of interaction between the darklands and the surface world. Write a LO about that area that goes 50/50 darklands and surface world and goes into some detail about the relationship between the two areas and how they interact with and affect one another. Then you can set an AP in that area that explores that in a more dialed-in sort of way. Lets you play the wave caster thing of taking half and half in a way that lets you make it more than just a sum of its parts. At that point, including an appropriately sized event wouldn't be necessary, though it might still be helpful. The real issue there is picking an appropriate spot. I'm not aware of any spots on Golarion that are that way already, which means that either they'd have to pick a spot that was not previously sufficiently explored and say "hey, check out what we found here" or they'd have to pick a spot that didn't have that kind of connection before and then add the upheaval that would come with gaining such a connection. Now, recent events have indicated that the team's not afraid of a bit of upheaval, but it's something to be used judiciously. So, even if they do pull somethign like that, it probably won't be soon.
I would like to apologize to everyone for having started this thread. I would like to especially apologize to those people who made a good-faith effort to engage with the very narrow intended topic of this thread. I am still interested in the original idea, but I simply do not have what it takes at this point to wade through the thing that this thread has become, and I can now see that attempts to *just* discuss that one topic in this space are pretty much doomed. To @Unicore in particular, I wish to acknowledge that you were entirely correct, though I did not see it at the time. I may at some point attempt a version of this thread on the homebrew forum with more care given to the title and the wording. Now is not that time.
So... in the lead up to the remaster, we did a lot of talking about how deities might blur the lines. Well, now we have some more information to blur the lines with. So let's talk about that. Most of the good gods were Heal Only, can choose Holy. That all fits, and we won't bother hitting them individually. Most of the neutral gods were Heal/Harm, can choose holy or unholy. That all fits, and we wont' bother hitting *them* individually either. Asmodeus is mandatory unholy/harm. Anathema change from "don't free slaves" to "don't share power with the weak". No surprises here, and not much to say. Asmodeus continues to be an awful individual. News at 11. Gozreh is Heal Only, No sanctification, which is interesting, but not surprising. Way more interested in making things alive than in making them dead, but wants no truck with the war in heaven. Iomedae is mandatory holy/heal, which really ought not be a surprise to anyone. Lamashtu is heal/harm, can choose unholy, which does that thing that lots of people have been looking forward to where you can play a nonhorrible child of the mother of monsters. Norgorber is harm/can choose unholy, which opens up the possibility of... a non-horrible follower of Norgorber? Well, it's an interesting idea, at least. Pharasma is None/Holy - basically the same schtick as Gozreh, except that she's more interested in the "smite the undead" part of the heal font than the "promote life" part. Rovagug is, again, mandatory harm/unholy. No one is surprised. Urgathoa is *also* mandatory harm/unholy, which puts a bit of a spanner in the gears for anyoen who was hoping to run a non-horrible splinter sect of hers. ...and finally, Zon-Kuthon is harm/can choose unholy. He's still a very edgy boy, but non-horrible devout followers are a real possibility (...and they probably mostly live in Nidal). /**********/ Interesting breakdown bits:
Lamashtu:
Norgorber:
Zon-Kuthon:
Wait, seriously? That's canon? If so, it argues for many of the less horrible Zon-Kuthon interpretations, at least for the pre-fusion Starfinder version of the deity. The idea that there legit were circumstances where he'd be willing to extinguish himself on Shelyn's behalf argues pretty hard that he wasn't entirely lost. ...and now that I've checked, I can see that the PF2 remaster version is can choose unholy, rather than must choose unholy. So that's interesting.
Jirelle has legendary athletics confirmed.
Also... Zon-Shelyn??? What?!? Ummm... what happened to Shelyn? Why has she changed her name? Please, someone, tell me she hasn't gone full cenobite like her brother... Best available information is that Zon-Shelyn is somehow both of them together. Also, I think I recall the Paizo folks mentioning somewhere that worship of baseline Shelyn was still available.
People keep mentioning technomancer and mechanic, but those both need to be in the 1st book released. The first book released is going to have soldier, envoy, solarian, witchwarper, mystic, and operative. Technomancer and mechanic are coming, but they won't be the first book. It was decided that they needed some more time in the tank. It's possible that they also need a bit more build-out on the gear list. I feel like that'd be a very cool angle for a primal witchwarper. Assuming witchwarpers are still focused around altering the areas around them. Well, that's fair. "Terraformer" works just fine as a background, and "primal witchwarper" is a very solid place to go with that one.
Do we know for certain that Nanocyte is going to be a full class? Especially if it's toned down to just the cloud version, it seems like the sort of thing that might make for an archetype instead... and if it did it well, I'd be pretty down for that. Why yes, I would like an archetype that's all about giving me a friendly nanobot swarm aura.
I kind of feel like I did in the second half of my post, but I guess that wasn't what you're looking for? It's fair. You didn't ignore it entirely. At the same time, the "MP vs Spell Slots" question is very nearly orthogonal to the question of when and how your resources refresh. @OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 - just wanted to say that I see your post, and it is worthy of response, and I just do not have the time right now. I'll try to get to it later.
So... various reactions As you say, this already exists in the current game. I accept that. I'm also not particularly trying to wipe out conservative play, or at least not entirely. The people who are particularly bad at it... tend not to play casters. I know that I personally avoid casters because I have this issue, and it makes the primary gameplay loop uncomfortable for me. At the same time, I expect that the assurance that more is available later, and the sort of "suggested budget" of your per-encounter income, should moderate those issues. Still, yes. It's going to mean that people probably play a little conservative and try to build up resources over the course of the day just in case. That's true. That's part of what the resource husbandry game is. The problem of the fifteen minute adventuring day comes from the fact that going to sleep fills you back up again on all of those shiny temporary resources. So, the caster wakes up, they head into their first fight, they blow all of their most important resources and get to feel super-awesome about it... and then they start complaining that they need to go back home and rest because they don't have any more of the really good spells. That's the fifteen-minute adventuring day. This one avoids that pretty handily. It starts you out with a bit in the tank, but it's actually to the caster's advantage to have a few encounters before the big boss, so they can go in with more of a full tank than they started the day with. Fifteen minute adventuring day isn't nearly so much of an issue with this one. The "people will play silly games for stockpiling advantages" is an issue. That's true. I believe that it's one that can be overcome with proper implementation, though. That's part of why I came up with the idea of having it be dependent on the challenge level of the encounter, hitting at the time you roll initiative. We don't want it to be anything that you can do out of combat, because then people will just sit and spin in relative safety. We don't want it to be anything that people can do in combat, because they'll beat the enemy down to the "no real threat" level and then sit and spin in relative safety. Thus, the two obvious times to do it are as a charge-up at the start of battle or as a reward at the end, and scaling it to the level of threat seems like a bonus as well. Now, can this be cheesed? Probably. In particular, it seems like a situation where you might want another rule that caused you to lose charge if you ran away. It's also something that might be a bit tricky to fit into the world thematically. It's a work in progress, and it hasn't progressed all that far as yet. Still, from what I can see, something like that could work.
The reason that I don't think you understand is that the issue I'm trying to address is almost entirely agnostic of the specifics of the classes involved. It's even largely agnostic to the overall comparative strength between casters and martials. The fact that you're trying to talk about the details of specific classes as anything other than brief illustrative examples means that, regardless of what you might think, we're not actually talking about the same problem. You think that I'm proposing the thing that I'm proposing in order to fix a specific issue that you're aware of and dislike, or in response to specific complaints made by others. I'm not. I'm proposing to fix this thing because it is a problem in and of itself, mostly for the second and third order effects that it generates, and the whole wizard thing is just the expression of those effects that happens to be most visible and frustrating to you.
Now... "primal caster based on terraforming". It's an interesting thought. There's two ways to take it, too. The first is that it's a skillset that's designed to *do* the terraforming. That doesn't fit particularly well, though. Like, I could easily imagine that primal casters might be useful in terraforming, and that there even might be specialized practices of primal casters that worked to optimize their arts for terraforming... but terraforming is slow. The primal caster who are out there optimizing for that are the kind that specifically aren't out there adventuring. They want very different things in life. The only way you're going to get a lot of terraformer primal casters of that variety pouring out onto the adventurer job market is if there was some awful cataclysm that somehow rendered a bunch of them unemployed and also radicalized them at the same time. Also, they probably wouldn't be going for magitech. Terraforming is a big enough job that you want specialists. You'd have them working with biohackers and whatnot, each one focusing on the jobs the other wasn't great at. You might want some kineticists in there too. On the other hand, if terraforming is a thing, then you might have terraforming druids that get in tune with its spiritual essence, that vibe with planets as they are being terraformed and really try to grok that stuff... and walk away with new insights into their magic. They might drop by and pitch in for a while, but they're also a lot more likely to be adventurers, because they have a ready-made reason to want to travel across the galaxy, in order to visit many planets and understand their environmental differences, especially those that are being terraformed (or, I suppose, horribly polluted). ,,,and yeah, that sounds like a full primal caster with some interesting additional terrain modification tricks. I'm not sure it's interesting enough to be worth implementing, but it's na idea.
I expect that we will get new classes for SF2. We might not get them as fast as we've been getting them for PF2 (unless SF2 becomes fantastically, gloriously more successful than I expect... which would be awesome.) but... there's only thirteen classes in SF1. We're getting six of those right out of the gate, and we've gotten confirmation that a seventh has already been eaten by one of the six. Some of the ones that remain might be downshifted to archetypes. Even if we get every single one of the remaining SF1 classes as classes, I really don't expect that they're going to hit six more classes after the first release and then stop. Like, PF2 has 23 of the things, and 4 more in the tank. Most likely to go archetype? You're probably going to hate this, but I'm thinking Nanocyte and Technomancer, with Vanguard as the most likely to be dropped entirely. (...or somehow turned into a Solarian class archetype?) Alternately, we could get them all. At the same time, it's worth remembering that "number of SF1 classes that get dropped or downshifted" has essentially no bearing on "number of SF2 classes we wind up with in the end". The only question is whether we're filling those slots with old classes or new ones.
First of all, thank you for trying to meet me where I am. I appreciate that. Second... I think there are ways to get the one without the other, and that the issue was that they were tricky and/or would have secondary effects that might need to be worked around and so forth. At the same time, I had also thought I'd laid out at least a general sketch of how they might be found or addressed, and your stated position seems to take as an assumed that they're indivisible. Now, I'd only come up with one such way (very roughly), and I'd wanted to leave things a lot more open under the theory that other folks could come up with other ways, but if I far enough out in space that I need to plunge into implementation to even make myself comprehensible, then I guess this well-meaning alien will do just that. At least in a general sense, I propose a system where casters have important resources that persist between encounters, that they will therefore wish to husband, but that they both consume and generate during encounters, such that the default average encounter is resource-neutral. Further, they shouldn't start the day maxxed out on this stuff. Going to sleep for the night should return you to a baseline, but there should be plenty of space above the baseline for you to accumulate resources that you can later spend, if you're fighting conservatively. This means that for a caster, the difference between a 1-encounter day and an 8-encounter day isn't nearly as big a deal, but they still get to have those fun decisions about how heavily to spend on any given fight... and they get to keep having those decisions all the way through the aforementioned 8-encounter day (or 12, or 16...) Now, is this an easy thing to implement well? No. That's why I'm hoping for some help here - to figure out some of the traps before we step in them, and try to come up with something interesting and coherent that makes sense and could work.
You don't seem to understand that the problem I'm trying to address is not the problem you think it is. I'm trying to address a core underlying structural issue that has a number of implications, some of them fairly subtle. It sounds like it's not directly impacting your personal enjoyment of play, and that's great, but that just means that it's not an issue for you and your friends in the games that you play. You've reached a rough general "number of encounters per day" that works for you, you've developed a good understanding of the amount of resources to spend under various conditions, and your GMs are consistent enough in their patterns that those intuitions remain accurate. That's great! That's how it should be. I'm happy for you. That doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist. Your proposed solution is to ensure that all classes have interesting, fun, impactful powers that they can use all day long. Okay, sure... but that's like a lot of the other suggestions we've seen. It's not trying to separate Husbandry from Attrition. it's just making both of them less important. It makes Attrition problems less of an issue, but it does it by raising the floor to the point that it doesn't matter nearly as much whether or not you have enough slots, and you're less likely to run out of slots because there are fewer situations where you want/need to use them. That's effectively the watered-down version of the "make every caster a kineticist" arguments. I mean, if what people really want is the set dressing of spell slots while not having slot management actually be a thing, then I guess it achieves that, but that's not really the thing I was trying to address. It's not about how much Attrition matters or should matter. That is an entirely different discussion. It's about trying to come up with a system where the Husbandry part of Attrition can exist as a meaningful thing, that you can't just handwave away, where people can and do plan around it, but where the downsides of the rest of Attrition aren't a thing. I'm hoping to come up with a system where budgeting out your spell slots matters (...and potentially matters a lot) but doesn't suck... regardless of how long the day gets ...and yeah. I'm willing to believe that your group has managed to square that circle. You all seem to be having a lot of fun. At the same time, the fact that it's possible to find a niche where the issue is basically handled (for most classes) doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist or is unworthy of consideration. There are people out there who aren't finding those niches.
In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system. ...and, indeed, this is what I'm trying to do with this thread. Is it me? Have I been unclear? Like, literally no one else in this discussion has addressed the issue as I presented it and asked for assistance on. Nobody. When you look around the room, and you're the weird one out.... I try, one more time, to explain the actual issue I'm trying to address. - Caster Resource Attrition: this is the bit where, over the course of the average adventuring day, the standard caster will slowly run out of resources. I assert that this is bad, for reasons mostly centered on how it makes certain parts of the balance math ooky, and also provides perverse incentives. I would like to have casters that, over the average adventuring day, maintain a pretty even balance on resources spent vs resources gained. - Caster Resource Husbanding: This is the bit where, in each individual encounter, a caster has decisions to make about how many resources they're going to spend on that encounter. This is the thing that lets them go heavier on the harder fights and lighter on the easier fights. I assert that this is good. It makes casters feel more like casters, and it's something that a notable chunk of the playerbase enjoys playing with. In basically every game of this lineage I've played, the two have been completely inextricable from one another. Resource Husbandry has only every been achieved through a Resource Attrition mechanism. That is the thing I want to change. I want to let people play the Resource Husbandry game without the downsides that Resource Attrition brings with it. As a side benefit, just about any way of doing this would also make the Resource Husbandry game more intuitive. One of the things that makes it weird is that you don't know how long your day is going to be. You don't know if the encounter you're in is the last encounter of the day or the start of a long slog. It means that you have to estimate reasonable expenditure with a component of wild guessing... and "guess what the GM is thinking" is not actually a fun game, regardless of what the GM might think. On the flip side, if you're somehow recovering a semi-predictable level of casting resources every encounter, then you know what the budget for that encounter is. You can go over budget or under budget based on the needs of the moment, but, critically, you know which one you're doing. I feel like this might make casters more accessible. They'd certainly be more accessible to me. That's just a side benefit, though, of uncertain utility. I'm not presenting this as a solution to the "casters are too complicated" complaint. Literally, this is me saying "Caster Resource Husbandry is cool and useful and worthwhile, but the rest of Caster Resource Attrition isn't great. Is there any viable way to get the one without the other?" Am... am I making sense here? I think that I'm being pretty clear, but.... ...or is it just that everyone else is more interested in asserting their own proposals of "how to make casters awesome" than engaging with the topic I'm trying to engage with? Was it the thread name? Do I need to just be way more precise about my thread names?
I'll have to see how well the builds click, but... there are possibilities here.
I just don’t think potential PF3 discussions belong in a PF2 general discussion forum because they just will innately attract edition flame warring here, and don’t actually represent a PF2 conversation, and will sour a lot of folks coming to Pathfinder 2nd edition forums to learn about the game with excitement or sincere curiosity. At this point it is really a homebrew conversation. I dunno. I see the argument that you're making, but in my experience, discussions like this (especially when clearly labeled) attract a lot less flame warring (and thus newbie souring) than, say, discussions about how (person) feels that (class) is too weak. Like, have any of these responses been something you'd describe as "edition flame warring"? I'm not seeing any.
I'm trying to address a very specific thing here, and it's something more structural than that. It's not about whether any given class is a good class or a bad class, or is fun to play or isn't. That's not the point of the thread. It's about trying to address the way that "cares about husbanding resources between encounters and deciding when to throw the impressive stuff and when to hold back" (which some people really enjoy) is currently linked hard to "becomes significantly stronger in very short adventuring days and much weaker in very long ones" (which warps balance math in weird ways and has a number of mild but unfortunate second-order effects). The rest of it... there's plenty of threads to argue about that stuff. This thread is trying to come up with general solutions to a very specific problem that exists in a potential space that's still vague enough that it doesn't have any specific classes in it yet to argue about.
3: Magic: include the Technomancer and the Vanguard. Lots of spells, and spell-tech items. Get into some lore (and mechancis) of how tech and magic can work together. Introduce some ancestries that have to do with magic Putting the Vanguard in the magic book seems like a really weird stretch. I mean, I get that you're kind of running out of options at that point if you want a magic-using class from SF1, but why does it have to be an old class? Why not something new? Of course, that's an interesting question in and of itself. We'd want a class that... - Was a slot caster of some variety. Maybe a wave caster, maybe a primary caster.
I almost feel like... two "different" kinds of technomancer. They'd need different names, of course. Still, on the one side we have the artificer-type, who creates and uses magitech items (temporary or otherwise) and is particularly good at drawing more power out of them and has a variety of buffs that they can use on tech items. On the other side, we have the hacker-caster, flips it around. Instead of using magic to empower tech, they use tech to inform and empower magic. They make deals with tech-spirits, they run magical scripts on their portable device, they cast spells through security cameras. I feel like both of them are maybe wave casters. The magitech engineer gets some spells, but is also reasonably good at using weapons, and gets a lot of their class budget in being able to magically enhance gear. They probably have a class path that's really into the SF2 version of Beast Guns. The original technomancer is focused in on their spellcasting, but they're still technically a wave caster... it's just that they have an incredibly robust suite of metamagic that lets them swing like a full caster while using wave caster slots.
Sure. I'm sure there are interesting ports out there to do interesting things in. I'm just saying... you're not likely to get particularly good answers on that one by asking. Being in a position to answer the question means that we don't know what the answers are.
Broadly speaking I agree with you on the caster vs kineticist thing. I'll say that there were a number of reasons that people didn't like 4e, and the caster thing was only one of them. There were also a lot of people who did like 4e. I was one of them. That said, it wasn't the abandoning of spell slots specifically that did it, I think. It was the fact that the resource economy for casters and the resource economy for martials was the same. I don't think we need to tie ourselves to the slot system itself, necessarily, but I do think there's real value to having casters able to play with resource economies that persist beyond individual fights. I think the idea of effectively limiting slots to your highest spell ranks is interesting, and it lends itself to an entirely different idea of cantrips and focus spells. Like, just going off of the current progressions for the moment, let's suppose that you're level 9. You can cast 5th level spells as slot spells. You can cast 4th level spells by spending a focus point. You can cast 3rd and under for free... and just follow that all the way up. The spells we know today as "cantrips" would be the 0-level spells that anyone could use. Obviously that's not the final form. There's some hairy math in there that would need serious massaging to get anywhere with, and it might not be worth the effort to balance. There's also the feel of it. Maybe they just wouldn't be able to give the big spells that awesomeness feel without separating them from the free-use spells by more of a margin than that. Still, I feel like the idea of "as you go up in level, your big powerful spells turn into your cantrips" is potentially kind of cool. It also combos in potentially interesting ways with an entirely separate idea to make most spells be scaling across levels, rather than individual distinct spells. It becomes a question of "how much fireball do you want to pay for this time? How much fireball do you think you need?" That could be interesting. At the same time, I feel like it thins the issue, but doesn't actually solve it. Again, you're stuck with a starter pile of daily resources, and no natural way to recover or unlock more. We're still in a situation where short days favor casters and long days favor martials. Maybe... somehow tie it to exp gain? I know it feels kind of janky, but if we had some handwavy explanation of what exp was, then we could tie it to that. A challenging encounter charges up this many spell slots, and an extreme encounter charges up that many. Works even better if you have the charge-up hit on rolling initiative. It woudl be giving the PCs information, but that could actually work. "Guys... guys? I don't know what that thing is, but my spell slots just filled. All of them."
All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.While this is true, it is worth noting that the game does not just encode resource consumption as a downside. It is also encoded as an upside. I did mention that in the section you quoted. Perhaps I wasn't explicit enough about it? Indeed, that's part of the problem. Effectively, the "Some classes are constrained by daily resources. Others aren't." paradigm leads to a situation where game balance skews between the classes depending on the length of the adventuring day. That's the issue I'm hoping to get ideas for here.
That doesn't actually address the issue, though. I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad ideas, but at best they're reducing the overall intensity of the "daily resources" thing, both good and bad, and not really changing its nature.
Wont happen, but a book that provides a non-spell slot magic system. I think it's pretty likely that we'll get a class or two with a non-spell-slot magic system (as kineticist was for PF2) but if you mean a method to convert casters into something that doesn't use spell slots, i agree with you that it almost certainly won't happen. We might see something like that out of a third party, though.
I disagree. It's way too early to be trying to come up with final conclusions, but the early discussion can be helpful. Get the ideas out there, get them into people's heads, let folks think about it for a while and come up with new ideas. Then, when we finally do get to the point where things have actually started to happen, there will be a body of thoughts and ideas that people have already worked with to a degree. You won't be starting from scratch. That kind of early prep can result in better answers overall. Also, in particular, when the new version finally does come out, that's suddenly going to be a time to talk about all sorts of implications and suggestions and whatever. The hype will be high, the discussions will be frenetic, and the mental resources to consider this stuff will have many, many topics to consider. Getting this kind of discussion started early, and working through at least some of the implications now means that when we finally do get to that time, we won't need to spend as much time/energy on it to get answers of comparable quality, and can afford to spend that time/energy on the hundred-some-odd other topics that will suddenly be immediately and intensely important.
Part of the point is that I don't want them to be another kineticist. I love the kineticist, but that's me. There are people out there who enjoy the idea of having medium-term resorurces to consider and husband and use efficiently. That's part of the game for them, and I don't want to take that away... and saying "everything is a cantrip or a focus spell" would do that.
I have never played SF1. For me, Absalom Station sounds pretty cool. It's the sort of place the's just filled with corners and crevices and people living out lives in their own little niches that they know quite well but that are completely unknown even a relatively short distance away. Those kind of crevices and niches are where the weirdness lives - the stuff that makes perfect sense inside its own very-dialed-in context but is completely bizarre to outsiders. I want to see a bunch of *that*. Other than that... I don't know. I mean, I haven't done much with SF1. I don't know the archetypal locations. I heard there was a planet full of dark elves that's being heavily reimagined, and I'm kind of curious what that's going to look like. I've heard that there was a profoundly eldritch planet that hatched, and I'm curious about the results there... but I suspect that there's other stuff that I'd be interested in if I knew it existed. Mostly, I'm here for the stuff that is deeply weird, but also internally consistent... and that goes beyond just the overarching locations. I want to be able to make friends with an undead spaceship and fly around in it. I want to fill my body with grafts and have that be a cool thing that it actually made sense for me to do. I want to sneak into the stronghold of some deeply nefarious group, thwart them with extreme prejudice, and then post an edited version of the thing on Youtube-equivalent for the likes.
So, first, I know that PF2 still has a good solid set of legs on it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it keep going for another 5 years or so, and that's cool. At the same time, we all know that PF3 is coming eventually. Eventually the lifespan of this version of the game will come to a natural close, and it'll be time for it to be rebuilt. We also know that the Paizo designers sometimes read these boards (and respond!) and so if we see structural issues with the current game, and we can come up with interesting workarounds, then that's maybe worthwhile. This one is to talk about caster vs martial longevity over the course of the adventuring day, and some of the cool stuff, and some of the not so cool stuff, and possibly try to come up with solutions that let us keep the good bits without so much of the bad bits. Martials are relatively simple. The core ability of the martial is very consistent. if you have enough healing power in your party to get their HP back to full, that generally means that they're good to go for the next fight, and can pretty much keep going indefinitely. They're great for people who don't want to worry about resource economies over the course of the day. Casters are more complicated. Their more powerful effects take the form of a pile of daily resources. This means that they can burst a lot harder. A caster burning top slots is a lot more effective than that same caster throwing cantrips and focus spells. This is great for people who enjoy the resource-juggling game that it creates, deciding which fights to focus on and which to dial back on, picking the moments to use their more potent effects, and so forth. All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak. Also, in some ways it can feel like the various options that add sustainability to casters are not necessarily as well-balanced as other parts of the system. They're harder to plug into the math. So this thread is about discussing ways to separate these two concepts - to let the people who want to play caster have their ability to prioritize some encounters over others while not making them overpowered in short adventuring days and underpowered in long. This is *not* a thread about specifics of anything having to do with the current classes or the balance of power between them. If you want to argue about whether casters are too weak and/or too strong there's an entirely different thread that's doing that just fine right now. Please go do that there. /**********************/ So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff. Of course, this has some weirdness of its own. In particular, it means that low-risk encounters actually give resources to the party. This has obvious bag-of-rats cheese issues, but those at least have well-known solutions. The weirder thing is that it does this on intended encounters as well. Like, suddenly, if you toss a few easy goblin encounters between the party and the big bad, they're likely to be walking into that big bad fight with more resources, rather than less. That gets a little odd. In many cases, it also gives the players reason to want to drag their fights out. Like, if casters are regenerating magic fuel by blasting with cantrips, then once you've beaten the enemy down tot he point where they're not much of a threat, the thing you really want to do is disable them as much as possible, and let the casters chip away at them with those cantrips until they finally keep over and die. You might even want to heal them a few times, if the economy of ti works out right. So... maybe something in the loot pools? Like, in addition to exp and whatever treasure there is to be found, there's some sort of caster resource that they can draw from defeated foes to fill up their resource pools. This has issues too, of course. Like, if all you do is drive your foes away, then you're not exactly in a position to extract their essences. It also seems like it might be a little tricky to square with doing things nonlethally... and that's before we get to the part where drawing the energies that power your magics from the bodies of fallen foes is just so very edgy, and all that that can bring with it. So yeah. It's not a trivial issue... which is why I figure that it's a potentially useful issue to brainstorm about and chew over and maybe have people come up with ideas that I can't come up with. Anyone have thoughts?
It's not that. Reading the original post, It's that they don't know how to excel as casters, and so "compare to martials in what martials are best at" is all they have left. Honestly, the argument of "Casters are good, you're just playing them wrong," only really highlights that Casters aren't a class that gives you much build versatility, and supports the "One True Build" idealism that PF2 has tried to go out of its way to demolish by enabling a lot of ways to build a character. It's also not that. It's not that they're lacking in versatility of viable builds. It's that it's too easy to get yourself dialed into bad strategies and bad builds and have a hard time getting yourself back out again. If you know how to build and play casters, there are plenty of options that work fine. The issue is that if you sit down with a martial class, knowing absolutely nothing about the game, and you put together the three to five most obvious builds/strategies with that class, all of them will *basically* work. That's just not the case with casters in the same way, and if you get dialed in on a caster strategy that isn't successful, ti can be hard to climb up out of that and find one that is.
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