Staffan Johansson's page

Will this follow the same principle as the Pathfinder 2 playtest (and the OG Pathfinder playtest before it): PDF available for free, but professionally printed book available for those who want it?

Part of the problem is that alchemist support abilities are pretty effin' weak. For example, look at the salamander elixir. It's a level 4 item that protects you from severe heat for 24 hours. This can be compared to a rank 2 spell like endure elements that protects you from either severe heat or cold for 24 hours. As a 12th level item it can protect from extreme heat, something endure elements does as a 5th rank spell.

I do think the alchemist was hampered by the decision to make alchemy stuff something that can be relatively easily bought, and then just give them some free stuff and some boosts in how to use them. It means their abilities will never be on par with those of spellcasters. And since they can use their reagents to make any level of item, they [b]can't[b] be, because if a 10th level alchemist's items were on par with 5th rank spells, they'd effectively have 15 5th-rank spells per day and that would be fairly wack.

Come to think of it, I think part of the issue is that spells in general, and cantrips in particular, are no longer part of a particular class's abilities. That means you can no longer balance a crappy class chassis (hp, armor, etc) with a good spell list, because that spell list can be used by other classes as well, and there are many ways to poach cantrips in particular.

So I think the solution to "cantrips are bad" should be some kind of buff to those classes that have a bad core, primarily sorcerers and wizards (and maybe witches), not to cantrips themselves. That, or make sure those classes have awesome focus spells.

SuperBidi wrote:

Well, maybe you should watch it again as Mark never said Electric Arc was overpowered, he just said that Electric Arc was stronger than the other cantrips and why.

Let's lay out the facts, shall we?

Mark explicitly states that Electric Arc was stronger than the other damage cantrips, in a game that emphasizes balance.

On the other hand, Mark Seifter also said that the pre-errata remaster Wounded rules were the correct ones and had been all along. So I'm not sure his opinions on game balance and gameplay are necessarily something to be treated as sacred.

Electric Arc being stronger than other cantrips does not mean it is too strong. It could be (and is) that the other cantrips are too weak. In particular, I think the designers overvalue effects that happen on critical hits/critical save failures, such as Ray of Frost's speed penalty.

The dead curriculum slots from some curriculums needs to be heightened to keep working efficiently (or they will become weaker than even cantrips):

The lesson there is not that the concept of focused schools is bad, but that they should be designed so that at least the lower-level slots have some spells that maintain their utility at higher levels.

For me, this is root of what I don't like about the new system. No matter how you want to define them, every spell that exists should be assigned to at least one school.

I strongly disagree. Not everything needs to fit in neat little box.

Remaster schools are not fundamental parts of the nature of magic. They are inherently social constructions, fields of study. There's nothing that inherently ties, say, the School of Civic Wizardry together other than a theme that means it makes sense to teach them together. There is no Civic Wizardry "essence" to them, they're just spells that make sense for someone interested in using magic for construction.

Or how a halfling barbarian can carry around 3 other halflings around all day and not be hindered or slowed down in the least.

How else would they fit in a trenchcoat?

based on how much class in core 1 changed

one should not expect much fixing with monk

maybe orichalcum strike at level 17

My understanding is that one of the reasons Paizo split the classes the way they did between Player Core 1 and 2 is that the PC2 classes needed some more revisions, and thus got put in the later book.

When they printed the CRB there was a "consensus", but evidently not. When they printed this everyone thought they were ok the same page, but evidently not.

I could see the conversation going like this:

... and then it got "fixed" in the wrong direction.

* Devise a Stratagem is a free action, period.

On a lore level, I like Devise a Stratagem to be an action. It seems like it should take some time to ponder things. But if it costs an action, it needs to have a much bigger payoff than getting to use Int to hit and getting a version of sneak attack off – maybe something like the rogue's debilitations, although that's more of a high-level thing. At lower levels, maybe something as simple as allowing a reroll of the d20 rolled as part of devising a stratagem if you follow through after a bad roll ("Plan 2"*). Alternately, make something like Known Weaknesses baseline, or take a page out of the Gunslinger's book and allow combining Devise with a number of different preparatory actions, such as reloading, or Step/Stride, or things like that.

* "Not plan B. Plan 2. Plan B implies we only have 26." –Scott Summers

I admit - the whole "continuity reset whenever you do a new edition/write another adventure that changes the setting" thing may be one of the more painful things to witness in RPGs.

I think my favorite edition-change explanation, and the one to which I tend to default, is the one Wizards used for Forgotten Realms and the 2e to 3e changes: both are imperfect approximations of the "real" Forgotten Realms. The Symbul didn't change from being a 2e wizard to being a 3e sorcerer, it's just that sorcerer is a better model for her natural command of magical forces.

Similarly, I don't think it's worthwhile to get bogged down in details of how magic works between editions. Specialists needing to use two slots in order to cast opposition school spells is the kind of nitpicking that isn't really helpful.

The concept of Sin and Virtue magic can be true without being tied in any way to a fundamental categorization of magic itself.

Sin magic would be a much cooler concept without being tied to the old schools of magic – particularly since many of the pairings were pretty bad to begin with. I mean, what is the association between the sin of Greed and things like erase, feather fall, or jump?

I am kind of sad so many ancestries still have 'low light or darkvision' as their thing. I would rather Paizo have moved away from almost every ancestry has better sight than humans trope. Its lazy and boring.

Reminds me of a Farscape episode that lampshaded this trope. There was some kind of threat that mainly consisted of an optical phenomenon, and the one human on the crew was the one who had to deal with it because all the other crew had far better eyesight and therefore were more vulnerable.

What part of these new schools feels like a good idea? I get that some people like the new flavor but I really question what there is to like about these new schools beyond that.

1. They are not the old schools, which were never a good fit. They originated as minor comments on AD&D 1e spells and were later used as building blocks way beyond what they were supposed to carry. Just look at how many times the schools have been rearranged since they actually got mechanical weight with Dragonlance Adventures and AD&D 2e.

2. They are expandable. I don't have the Player Core yet, but it has what, four schools in it? That's nothing. You could easily add dozens of schools for various purposes. The old schools were collectively all-encompassing, so there was no way to expand upon them.

3. They are not tied to OGL material.

I read about D&D 5th Edition providing too much mid-combat healing, but I had not imagined that it meant letting teammates drop before healing them. My PF1 and PF2 players are careful to heal their teammates before they dropped, except in the three situations that I mentioned in my previous comment.

One difference is that after level 1 PF2 healing is significantly chonkier than D&D5 healing. In PF2, a 2-action Heal heals somewhere around half of a fighter's hp (a bit more at level 1, a bit less at level 2, and then it stabilizes around there), and does so at range. In D&D5, there are two main healing options: Healing Word as a bonus action at range, which (after level 1) heals between 1/3 and 1/5 of a fighter's hp, and Cure Wounds as an action with touch range healing between 1/2 and 1/3 (again after level 1). I'm treating level 1 in D&D5 as an outlier because (a) going by the XP charts, it's intended to be over really really quick, and (b) healing spells in D&D5 add the caster's casting stat bonus to the healing done, and adding 4 to 1d4 throws things off by a lot more than adding it to 3d8.

D&D5 is also nicer to characters recovering from being dying because of its looser action economy. The character could recover their weapons as an interaction (nearly free action) and stand up at the cost of half their move. In PF2, grabbing a weapon would be an action, as would standing up be.

These factors, in addition to PF2's dying/wounded rules, help make yo-yo healing a more reasonable plan in D&D5.

Mostly agreed. It's interesting to note that PF2 and D&D5 both have full-caster Bards and at-will cantrips. But this is coincidental; PF1 and D&D4 also had at-will cantrips, and PF2 made Bards full casters to give all four traditions a full caster class in the core rulebook. (I have no idea what D&D5's reasoning for making Bards full casters was. Bards were the only "Tier 3" core class in D&D3.5; they didn't need "fixing"!)

Probably two-fold:

1. Bards were seen as weak in 3e, and they thought they could use the buff.

2. 5e doesn't have 2/3-casting like in 3e. There's full casting, there's half casting (what paladins, rangers, and artificers have), and there's third casting (what eldritch knights and arcane tricksters have).

I really don't get where people are getting these two Dying values from. A Dying character has one Dying value. When you drop to 0 hp, your Dying value is set to 1 + your Wounded value, or 2 + your Wounded value if you were brought low by a critical hit. If you fail a Recovery check, your Dying increases by 1 (or 2 on a critical failure) plus your Wound value.

There is not a "base Dying" that's set to 1 (or 2) and then a "total Dying" that's Dying + Wounded. There's nothing in the rules that indicate that.

I mean, I'm going to run with the commonly accepted old rules, but unless there's official word to the effect of "That was a mistake that slipped through", I have no illusions that doing so is anything but a house rule. It wouldn't be the first one.

Do With Panche!

When you move or Interact, you can attempt to do it stylishly. Make an Acrobatics check or a skill check based on your swashbuckler style at a Very Hard DC for your level.

No class ability or feat should ever default to using a "very hard DC for your level". That is a bad mechanic, and any ability that uses it should be rewritten. If you want to tie the use of an ability to a particular skill, just have it work but tie the actual effect to the skill proficiency rank.

To be honest, now that the alignment is gone, similar to what happened with the wizards, it is now much easier for Paizo to create an even greater variety of champion subclasses over the course of new books.

Yeah, one thing I like from the other game is that paladins are defined by a cause (or Oath), not an alignment. Some of the oaths kind of shoehorn you into (or at least out of) certain alignments, but alignments are not what define them.

Eh, not really. A party without frontliners has a grand total of zero people on the front line, by definition.

I would object to that. I would say that a party without a proper frontliner has four people on the front line, and that's generally four people who don't want to be on the front line.

The class starts out proficient in more skills than average, but isn't really a skill monkey. On the contrary, as mentioned in the OP, they're practically forced to dedicate some of their standard skill increases towards their panache skills, making them more specialized than most.

That's a problem in general in PF2, that there are basically only two speeds when it comes to skill acquisition: there's the OK one rogues and investigators get, and there's the crappy one everyone else gets. Having additional starting skills just means there's more stuff you might think you should be good at at higher levels but aren't.

Any class for whom several skills are part of their core identity should get some form of skill buff above the default. I'm mainly thinking of Bard and Ranger, but I'm sure there are other examples.

Now I'm starting to lean back to adding Wounded 1 only once because it is a condition. Adding wounded a second time when increasing dying is like adding Frightened up and stacking it or any other condition, which is not how it works. A condition is added only once using the highest condition modifier.

Remastered Wounded seems to be acting more like a "weakness to Dying" than a condition. If you have weakness 5 to fire and take 5 fire damage, you're actually taking 10 fire damage. If you get another hit for 3 fire damage, you're taking 8 points, and now you've taken 18 points of fire damage. You've taken your weakness damage twice, because you've taken two instances of fire damage.

Similarly, Wounded "triggers" each time Dying would increase. If you're Wounded 1 and hit 0 hp, you would normally gain Dying 1 but instead you're Dying 2. You fail a recovery check and would normally increase Dying by 1 but instead you increase it by 2 and hit Dying 4 which means you're dead.

I get why advanced weapon proficiency exists, I get why advanced weapons exist but the restrictions and accessing and using them seem over done. Why create a whole category of weapons that punish all but a few classes for using them. Give access with the right feat at full proficiency and move on. I still don't even see many druids or bards using advanced weapons but at least a feat would support those that choose to and I don't think it would break or unbalance the game.

The only reason I can think for not doing it is somehow advanced weapons are seen as part of the fighters class identity and giving access to other classes to make good use of it somehow infringes on that. That however would be contrary to the rest of the design and also a hell of a waste of printing space for all those weapons to only be good for 1 class.

I think it's one of those "abundance of caution" things. It's real easy to design an advanced weapon to just be a higher-damage version of some martial weapon, and if you could get full access to that via a general feat that would be a no-brainer for many builds (particularly since, at least in 2.0, there aren't all that many good general feats).

If I had my druthers, advanced weapons should be the ones who are actually complex in their usage. Hook swords, fire poi, and flickmaces, yes. Falcata, no-dachi, and broadspear, no. Those can just be local variations of regular martial weapons. And ideally, advanced weapons should have a fair amount of traits but generally non-exceptional damage. That way, they become specialized tools for those who can exploit those traits, rather than just "better" weapons.

Also, the new Dying rules don't change that this party has one big weakness: a lack of frontline tankyness outside the Fighter. It was the case preremaster as much as it's the case post remaster.

How many tank-type characters do you think are appropriate to have in a four-person party? How many characters with strong AOE abilities? How many characters being able to deal good sustained damage? How many characters who can deal with hazards, particularly traps and haunts? How many healers, both of regular ol' hp and of conditions? How many characters with battlefield control?

Staffan Johansson wrote:

OK, you're fighting a monster whose level is one or two higher than yours. They just dropped the party fighter in the first round. What tactics do you suggest? Other than "run away and let Bob roll up a new character"?

Fight and kill the monster. What tactics were you suggesting before the Fighter dropped?

That's a goal, not a plan.

Now, if your whole party is relying on a single character for damage, the fault is on you. All classes are able to deal significant damage, overspecialization is not a good thing and can lead to this ridiculous situation.

Where did you get that the party relied on a single character for damage? But in your archetypal fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard party, the fighter is likely the one who's more likely to be able to survive and take damage. They probably have the best AC (on account of heavy armor) and the most hp. And now they're out. That also means that the rogue has likely lost their flanking partner and won't be able to sneak attack, unless the cleric volunteers to stand around and get smashed.

And note that I was talking about a level 4 creature against a level 3 party. That creature is probably not alone – you'd need to add in a level 1 creature to the encounter in order to reach what's supposed to be a moderate encounter.

I wish the devs would weigh in on the whole dying/wounded thing. I get that the PDFs started getting sent out on Wednesday, and of course it took some time for people to absorb them which meant that the whole thing exploded mostly on the weekend, so they probably haven't had much time to react yet. But it would be nice if someone official could pop in – ideally saying "Oops, we made a mistake here" but even a "We hear you and we're having internal talks and will get back to you" or a Seifter-esque "That's what they were supposed to be all along" would at least be something instead of all this flailing about and guessing at intentions.

Also, are such beings that are neither good or evil pre-remaster (such as aeons) which had weakness to chaos for example, going to have a different weakness to replace them, are they going to be susceptible to both? Or a stronger weakness toward what sort of material does more damage to them?

I'd go with no weakness, and compensate by dropping their hit points by double the value of the weakness.

Why double? I used the Theletos as a base, a level 7 creature with 125 hp and weakness to chaos 5. The normal medium hp range for level 7 is 111 to 119, or 115 on average, so it appears having a weakness to chaotic damage is worth a hp increase of double the weakness. I have not looked at other monitors to see if they have a similar ratio of weakness to hp boost.

Although, I will say that honestly, a PC going down within the first round of combat is indicative of not being fully healed between combats, or facing an extremely powerful opponent, neither of which is really commonplace.

At low levels, even a level +1 creature has like a 10-15% (I think it comes down to about 11%, which is 1 in 9, or the same chance as rolling a 5 on 2d6) chance of KOing a fighter in two attacks. While that's certainly not the expected result, it's definitely not one you should be surprised by.

Inspire heroics, now called fortissimo composition, got the weirdest buff. Rather than being a very hard dc based on the highest level creature affected, it is now based on the highest will DC of targets affected. In the worst case this is usually easier by 2-3 but if you don't have a character with capped wis and will progression (most parties without a cleric or druid) it'll be even easier.

Sweet Shelyn, I hate that mechanic. I get that they want to reward bards for maxing Performance, but a better way would be something like: "The bonus from your inspire courage or inspire defense increases to +2 (+3 if you are a Master of Performance)."

People, both players and GMs, will just need to understand that Wounded 1 means just one step from Dying. And adapt their respective playstyle accordingly.

OK, you're fighting a monster whose level is one or two higher than yours. They just dropped the party fighter in the first round. What tactics do you suggest? Other than "run away and let Bob roll up a new character"?

Two, it still doesn't feel like the Dying/Wounded rules overly affect 'new gamers'. It affects people who want to avoid healing themselves or allies before they drop. Which is a tactics choice, not a 'new gamer' type of thing to do.

We're talking Pathfinder 2nd ed, where monsters hit you like effin' trucks. Unless you want the healers to spend all their time in combat casting heals (and perhaps not even then), there pretty much is no "safe zone" of hp below full.

Let's say you have a 3rd level fighter. They likely have AC 21 and about 38 hp (Assuming Con 14 and an 8 hp ancestry). Let's say they're fighting a generic level 4 creature with high (which is the default for a melee-oriented creature) attack bonus and damage, which is +14 and 14 respectively according to the GMG. Fighting a level+1 creature is, while not the default assumption, far from uncommon.

The creature's first attack hits on a 7+ and crits on a 17+. Second attack would be 12+ and 20. So while it's not the expected result, a crit and a hit is well within the realm of possibility. That's about 42 points of damage, well over the fighter's max hp. That's not a matter of taking a risk of not healing someone running dangerously low on hp, that's a matter of getting Worfed without any chance of doing anything about it. And having taken even a single hit means that if your foe crits you, or even just rolls two regular hits, you're out. And a rank 2 heal heals for about 25 hp, so you would be forgiven for not wanting to "waste" on on overhealing after a single hit.

And yes, there are ways of mitigating these results. You could use a shield and both get an AC boost and perhaps use Shield Block to mitigate some of the damage. You could be using smart tactics to deny the opposition more than a single attack. But that's getting advanced, and carries its own negatives (e.g. using a shield means you're not using a two-handed weapon which means you're doing less damage which means the fight is taking longer which means you'll be taking more attacks)

The change/clarification to the Dying rules is a big one. Our group took one look at that and said "nope."

Apparently chain lightning, fireball, disintegrate, and haste are all unchanged.

Blaster wizards everywhere can relax, and mourn the loss of cone of cold in peace with their new best friends, falling stars and thunderstrike.

Howling blizzard says hi. 5th level spell, 10d6 cold damage, can either be cast as a 60 foot cone for 2 actions or a 30 foot burst at 500 feet for 3.

I rather like how the duplicate foe spell is duplicated! ;p

Reminds me of the 3.5e Expanded Psionics Handbook, which had the power deja vu in it twice, on different pages.

Man, I do NOT get the point of sacred ground.

The point is that it partially replaces Ward Medic.

You were just in a fight. Frank the Fighter stood up front and took most of the damage, and is down 60 hp. Robert the Rogue and Wanda the Wizard took some incidental damage during the fight and are down about 10 hp each.

So you use Sacred Ground and then get to work patching up Frank, and rely on Sacred Ground's healing to top up Robert and Wanda.

Is that super useful? Perhaps not. But it's certainly a niche for it.

I would say that an arrow through the foot, might hurt a decent bit?

Not as much as one through the knee, which can terminate your whole adventuring career.

Wow. A level sixteen feat to reload when you cast a spell. Revealed far too late to be changed so people actually get to use it.

Hope this means adventure paths are gonna start reaching that level.

There have been a lot of adventure paths for PF2 that reach 20th level: five 1-20 APs, and two 11-20 (not counting Kingmaker as that's outside the regular APs). Playing long enough to finish them is a different matter.

Snares are a mess, an option which sounded cool on paper, but so few people would actually use them at all (not just rangers). It is just a forgettable feature as soon as people read about the details of how to use snares. Over the years since playtest, I had exactly zero players using snares (around 80 characters of various classes appeared in my games and around 20 in the games of my friend).

The fundamental problem with snares is that they are a tactically defensive option in a game where PCs generally are on the offensive. I don't mean defensive as in giving an AC bonus, but on a tactical level: snares require the enemy to come to you, but in most cases PCs are the ones that are going somewhere where they aren't wanted.

That's certainly not the only problem, but it's the fundamental one. You basically can't make snares strong enough to compensate for that, because then they'd be automatic win buttons in the situations where they do work.

On one level they make for a cool fantasy, with the grizzled woodsman preparing the upcoming battleground and then luring the enemy onto it and getting to use a bunch of snares. Or, for that matter, a Home Alone scenario. But how often does that happen? Certainly not enough to be worth maxing out your Crafting skill, spending one or more skill feats, and up to six class feats. It might be worth it if it was a single class feat that gave you automatic scaling Crafting as well as scaling with the higher-level benefits as well.

(That's a pretty common problem with PF2 class feats, by the way: you need to sink too many of them into doing One Cool Thing, because each level-appropriate step on the way is its own feat. A monk being able to stomp hard enough to knock people over is not just one feat, it's part of a three-feat chain.)

Minor changes, but don't fix what isn't broken. I do have two minor issues:

1. It would be good if Crossbow Ace applied to all weapons with Reload.

2. There is still the Sling confusion, where Sling is both a weapon category and a specific weapon. As a result, it is unclear whether things like Titan Slinger affect the halfling staff sling or not. I hope this is cleared up in the Titan Slinger feat instead.

Slings could definitely use some love.

Slow (2e) - targets 1 creature, save failure removes 1 action, which is irrelevant to enemies because a third attack will always miss and monsters don't usually have a good third action

Slow is amazing in PF2. Many, many creatures have some form of 3-action routine that can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you start your turn next to a dire wolf, they can use a Jaws attack on you, then automatically Grab you with their second action if they hit, and then deal automatic damage with their Worry action. A Troll that hits you with two claw attacks can use their third action to automatically Rend you. Trample is a three-action activity.

It's not the iWin(TM) button it was in PF1, but it's pretty damn strong.

It doesn't look like you'll need to worry about runes in SF2e given the field test seeming to bake it into the weapons.

But that's still the same thing. High-level people have to use expensive high-level weapons in order to do high-level damage. I don't care whether that's because they go buy a new higher-level weapon or if they slap a rune on it, it's still not what I want. I do not want leveled weapons. If John Wick shoots you with a pistol, he's going to do a butt-load of damage not because he's using an "Elite semi-auto pistol" but because he's John effin' Wick.

An operative should be able to conceal a dozen or two blades on their person and be equally lethal with any of them. That is completely impossible in both Starfinder 1 and Pathfinder 2 without nerfing yourself to doing 1st-level damage, because there's no way you can afford a dozen or two Ultra-thin daggers.

As an addendum to my tirade above: I like the way Pathfinder finds ways to make each weapon balanced (more or less) through the use of traits balanced against damage and proficiency classification. It creates a strong sense of using the right tool for the right job, which I like. Use a flail to trip a foe, or an axe to deal with multiple opponents, or a polearm to counter an enemy with reach.

I do not like how it then forces people to mostly only carry one weapon for serious work, because the need to upgrade the weapon with runes is too expensive to maintain on more than one weapon, and maybe a backup ranged weapon (or melee if you're primarily ranged) a couple of levels later once everyone who wants them have level-appropriate runes on their main weapons. It also reduces the options available in a fight: "Well, since my main weapon's a battle axe and I'll be holding a shield in my other hand, I sure ain't going to be trying to trip or shove anyone any time soon."

Both case are already covered by runes and talisman slots in PF2.

I don't thing there's any reason to not repeat the successful caso os upgradable and modularity of rune system and talisman slot system.

Personally I do not like the way fundamental runes work in Pathfinder, and I would like it even less in Starfinder. I do not want high-level characters to be dangerous because they wield a +2 greater striking weapon. I want them to be dangerous because they are high-level characters, and high-level characters should be dangerous in and of themselves. A high-level operative should be able to murder you with a teaspoon taken from your kitchen cupboard. John Wick is dangerous because he's dangerous, not because he wields the Gun of the Ancients. And while Bond is traditionally equipped with a variety of gizmos from the Q Branch, his Walther PPK is a standard issue pistol.

Take this classic scene where Chow Yun Fat's character sets up for an assassination by planting a number of guns along his escape route (even if it doesn't work out so well for him in the end). That type of thing doesn't work if each gun is worth more than a frickin' ship. Or the typical scene where the rough dude is told to remove all his weapons, and it takes like five minutes because of all the knives.

Pathfinder needs a whole bunch of workarounds to cover something as basic as dual-wielding, simply because of its reliance on powered-up weaponry over lethality being inherent in the wielder. I dearly wish for Starfinder to go down a different path.

It is a pretty awesome idea for a villain though. Especially if you introduce them as an antithesis to an Animist PC which just sounds like a really fun idea.

That reminds me of playing WOW: Wrath of the Lich King.

For those who don't know, World of Warcraft has a shaman class that's flavored as getting many of their abilities by communing with various elemental spirits that give them power. In earlier versions, they had a bunch of class-specific quests to seek out various spirits in order to ask for their beneficence (IIRC, at levels 10, 20, 30, and 40, where they had to ask an elemental for the ability to make totems of that element, with totems essentially being summoned things that provide some benefit or do something). Anyhow, benign co-existence with the spirit world was a Big Thing for WoW shamans.

And then Wrath of the Lich King came along. Where we first met the Taunka, a variant of the Tauren (basically minotaurs with strong native american vibes). These Taunka also had shamans. However, these dudes lived in the harsh and frozen north. They had no time for this bargaining and stuff: they used various methods to force the elements to do their bidding. This would become a bigger issue in later expansions.

This idea is basically how priests worked in AD&D 2e. When they made AD&D2, they basically combined the 1e druid and cleric spell lists, and split them up into different Spheres. Each deity/priesthood would then grant access to a certain number of spheres based on its theme, along with providing granted powers. This was a big flavor win, but came with a bunch of issues.

1. Basically, each priesthood became its own class. So if your setting had, say, 20 "core" deities, that's 20 classes to build.

2. It was hard to keep track of which spells you had access to. It was doable with just the PHB, but if you had spells from multiple sources it was pretty annoying. This would be a lesser issue today where you could easily make a website that let you check off which books and which spheres you had, but in the early 90s that was not an option for most players.

3. The existence of the classic Cleric (and to a lesser degree the Druid) was an issue. In the PHB, it was presented as the "simple" version of the priest, with access to most spheres as well as all blunt weapons, all armor, plus the Turn Undead granted power. Was this supposed to exist alongside Priests, or was it the lazy DM's option for those who didn't want to build a bazillion priesthoods? And TSR being the well-oiled machine that it was, naturally different settings took different approaches to this (although most leaned pretty heavily on the cleric).

4. How powerful should a Priest be? The PHB was woefully inadequate in providing guidance. The Complete Priest's Handbook took the tack of being the first splatbook in history to nerf the class it was supposed to be about, and started from the position that the Cleric was grossly overpowered, and provided something like 80 bare-bones priesthoods of various concepts. Faiths and Avatars, for the FR setting, did the opposite and made pretty much all the specialty priests (a term used to differentiate them from clerics) into clerics with extras.

5. Many "essential" spells were put in various spheres that would make them inaccessible to some priests. For example, only clerics with the Astral sphere would be able to plane shift. Cure X Wounds spells were part of the Healing sphere, while things like raise dead or regenerate was Necromancy, so it was completely possible to make a priest who couldn't heal. Which might be a flavor win, but sort of goes against the core role of the class. And in addition, since the list was based on previous cleric and druid spells, even spheres like Combat and Elemental were more about buffs and protection than offense.

Now, these are some issues caused by a previous iteration of the idea. That doesn't make it a bad idea. It just means that these are some things to consider before going ahead: anyone can learn from their own mistakes, but the smart people learn from the mistakes of others.

Also, I feel like this would be a mistake for Starfinder in particular. Being able to upgrade weapons and armor as you go ought to be part of the sci-fi adventurer experience.

I'm really not a fan of the "replace your guns" experience in Starfinder 1. I'd rather see your weapons' base stats just increase with level (or level give appropriate bonuses to attacks). A 10th level operative should be able to grab a pistol from a random mook and wreak absolute havoc with it.

That's not to say there's not a place for gear to be a money sink, however. Perhaps the Operative's favorite gun has a bullet-phasing attachment, allowing them to negate cover. Or the soldier's assault rifle may have an under-barrel grenade launcher, letting them shoot a grenade at significant range for a single action. Spending your money on Cool Stuff is more fun than just spending it on Bigger Numbers.

2. Paizo does generally answer the sorts of questions you pose where they become relevant. Ex: high hazard DCs are explained in the hazard creation rules.

The hazard creation rules explain that most hazards should have one "extreme" value and the rest at "high". But I can't see anything explaining why even the High values are 2-8 points above the values on the DC by level table (which are already too high, see below). The effect is that only an ultra-specialist is able to deal with hazards. This is reinforced by requiring a minimum skill rank to deal with a hazard, although that's mostly redundant because unless your skill is maxed out your chance of success is so low you're probably better off just hitting it until it stops.

The only thing I think you won't see is "why aren't PCs assumed to be broadly competent," probably because I am not sure what you mean but don't entirely think that is true. Paizo wanted proficiency to advance even in untrained skills in the playtest but people hated it. But you can get that back with the untrained improvisation feat.

What I mean is that the game rewards skill specialization, which means that people will put their skill increases into pushing their good skills higher. So you will generally get an Expert skill at 3rd level, and a second at 5th. Then at 7th you'll increase one of those to Master and the other one at 9th. At that point you probably have like 3-5 skills at Trained in addition to the two at Master, and those Trained skills fall behind expected DCs (particularly if they're in secondary or tertiary stats, and if you don't push them with skill-increasing items). So instead of the 5-7 decent skills you had at level 1, you have 2 skills you're reasonably competent in and 3-5 skills in which you're more likely to fail than succeed when used in a level-appropriate context. You are losing breadth. This is even more noticeable when playing a class that starts out with more skills than usual, like the bard or ranger.

This process continues at higher levels, where you're likely to get a third Expert at level 11 and increase that to Master at level 13, followed by increasing these three skills to Legendary at level 15, 17, and 19. The effect is that a 20th level character is great at three things (plus killing, in most cases) but feels like they're bad at everything else. I mean, objectively a 20th level character with Arcana +23 (Trained, Int +1) is significantly better than they were at 5th level (+8), but the 5th level character "only" needs to roll a 12 to ID a 5th level creature while the 20th level character needs a 17 to ID a 20th level creature. That certainly doesn't feel like I'm getting better.

I'd rather see a skill pyramid than a tower, where a non-rogue 20th level character would have 2-3 skills each at Master and Expert in addition to the three Legendary. Either that or recalibrate the DC-by-level table to not assume you keep increasing skill ranks and stats (which would basically change it to DC 14+level).

pi4t wrote:

Can I politely suggest putting that information in the revised rulebooks somewhere? It's about half the number of encounters per day recommended in 5e or PF1, and I think groups coming from those systems try to run the number of encounters per day they're used to and end up finding spellcasters aren't able to contribute properly.

That's a broad generalization of the guidelines that are already in the rulebook.

Quote:

Moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely. Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting.
[...]

Generally that means that your party should be loaded with enough "ammunition" to successfully tackle 3 Moderate encounters. Low and Trivial encounters don't really require any resource expenditure.

With all due respect, I don't think it says anything of the sort. It says "Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting." That tells me that characters are supposed to be able to face multiple moderate encounters per day, but it says nothing about how many of them. Is it 4 like in 3e/PF1? Is it 6-9 like in 5e? It might be obvious to you who designed the game, but it's certainly not obvious to the reader (nor to the writers of your first few APs – even as late as Fists of the Ruby Phoenix you have PCs being expected to face a whole level's worth of encounters in a single day, and keep that pace up for four consecutive days).

I don't know to what degree the GM Core is set in stone, but these types of insights would be a great help. For a great example of how to actually guide a GM rather than just providing procedures, see 13th Age with all its sidebars from its two designers, explaining choices they made and how they recommend using the rules.

This could preferably extend to other aspects of the game as well, like "Why are hazard DCs so high", "Why are non-Rogue PCs not expected to be widely competent at skills", "What's wrong with giving flight and other mobility options at low level?", and "How do I design an encounter that's interesting and not just mathematically challenging?"

Sanityfaerie wrote:

I read a thing on a different thread that rang very true to me.

Well, Operative has your pistols, knives, and sniper rifles. Soldier has your big heavy weapons (ranged and melee) and in particular, is covering the "I'm the party tank" role pretty well as far as weapons are concerned. So what's left is... the mid-range stuff? Like, yeah. We don't have anyone who's particularly good at rifles, or swords, or spears.

I don't see it. You can build a Soldier to be either very good at ranged weapons or very good at melee combat. We faced one of the latter in the last adventure I was in and they were devastating, nearly a total party wipe because we just weren't prepared for an opponent that could hit us almost every time and take most of us down to near zero in one full attack. It wasn't doing anything unusual, it was just a well-optimized Soldier.

That's the SF1 Soldier. The SF2 Soldier is getting a stronger focus on (a) AOE attacks, (b) heavy armor, and (c) face-tanking. Snipers seem to be an Operative specialty, and it's uncertain who if any handles other combat specializations.