Syndrous's page

I believe that PF2e has the potential to be a good system for all, I really do.

I believe the chief cause for concern right now, for myself, is that the classes are too homogeneous due to a combination of proficiency being too weak as a system at this time and magic being overly nerfed.

I want it understood that overall, the direction that Paizo is going is good in my eyes, simply because it is removing the splat-books from contention for a while and I genuinely hope they slow down splat-book publishing to ensure balance.

The flip side to that is they really need to move away from the equal level challenges should be a 50/50 win chance thing they have going on. I personally find the easiest solution being a buff to the proficiency system, not adjustment of the DC table, that coincides with additions to the objective DC tables so we have some mile-stones and examples of high level activities for design of our adventures. I truly believe it is up to the GM to determine the DC's of challenges in his world, so long as there is a baseline chart with 1-2 examples of a given DC at various levels, this gives the GM creative balance and the player a baseline to figure out how to be good at what.

The other issue I see needing a correction is the utility level of magic. Utility magic needs to be buffed. Save DCs are way too high to hit with the number of spell slots casters have.

Blasting is an issue, I agree to a point, but it is one I don't know how to solve, because I don't believe a caster needs to be dps focused.

Ultimately, Paizo will handle this as they wish, I merely want to be heard and considered as a customer, since this is a product I plan to invest heavily in.

I would play as the system is right now, but only because I do a lot of very heavy world building and can fix the things I don't agree with. But I'd really rather they fixed a few of the numbers balance issues they have, that are working against players having fun right now.

ereklich wrote:

Quote:

Nope, they really want you to have a 50% chance to succeed an on-level Hard Task, because, well they are hard, and require a GM to put some actual thought into designing them.

But if a *fully optimized* character only has a 50% chance? That's not hard, that's insane. Because that means the rest of the party is screwed if they have to make the check too.

That is NOT the intent of the system as we level.

The intent for Hard is clearly stated to be as follows:

Quote:

A character who’s really strong in the skill starts at around a 50% chance of succeeding but ends up almost certain to succeed at higher levels.

I have been working on a larger post, but it shows that even with the current 1-3 chart, on the Hard column fully optimized you start at 55%, but as you level you slowly improve over the 20 levels to succeed 80% of the time. While I do not think that is quite enough improvement, there is definitely character growth and your character does improve. I am hoping to get it posted Soon(TM)

Unless you factor in items you don't actually become more likely to succeed. Your chance to succeed only increases from items, magic and feats.

The level 20 Hard DC is 39. A character that is naked, because the DC is designed to challenge specifically ability and proficiency optimized characters, has a Legendary Proficiency (+3) and a max ability score for level 22 which gives us (+6).

This gives us a total of level (+20) + proficiency (+3) + ability mod (+6) for a total modifier of +29, so you succeed on a 10.

The whole description clearly states that Hard DC challenges those who keep up with ability investment and proficiency investment.

You get to 80% because of items (both mundane and magical), feats, magic and ancestral feats.

This means that yes, the intent of the chart is to keep a naked barbarian with Legendary Athletics and Maxed Ability Mod at a 50/50 shot to climb an on level task. Key thing here is naked.

I do think they need more varied magic items to boost the various skills that are available at different level, and much better magical and feat support for this whole concept.

I think Paizo needs to give us more examples in the Ordinary Tasks list. Once we have some appropriate tasks to compare with, determining it will become easier.

I also think we need some rules about how weather would effect checks.

I still want to know why the system calls out Hard as the typical DC you should default to in almost every situation. I would think Medium would be the default for non-trivial tasks that actually call for a check. Easy would be when there are favorable circumstances, Hard shouldn't happen unless there are unfavorable circumstances.

I am actually confused about that as well, because Mark Seifter has mentioned using the table values too often in Doomsday Dawn.

That statement implies that the DC's used for future adventure paths may not align with the values present in this chart as well.

My purpose in these discussions is to try and make sure we are considering this from all angles, it's what I do, I am a debater type personality. I'll take a position I don't agree with and defend it just to make sure we cover everything.

So far, that's a great thing, because folks have been ignoring the rest of the picture which is the Ordinary Task charts (10-3/4/5/6) and how they relate to Chart 10-2. Chart 10-2 gives an arbitrary list of DC's and tells use what level they are appropriate to. It gives us no idea of the tasks we will have at those levels. That's where the other charts come in, and believe me they still need fleshing out.

I don't necessarily disagree with you guys re:hard not needing to be the default difficulty, but someone has to make sure we are understanding this right, and right now there is a lot of misunderstanding happening.

My reading of this section of the book is that the GM assigns a task a level and difficulty, as it relates to the example tasks in charts 10-3/4/5/6, and then determines the DC's. Then the GM has a baseline to work with, that baseline is modified by the circumstance when the PC's get to that particular task.

Are they being chased by bandits when they find the collapsed bridge that requires 3 Athletics checks to jump across the remaining supports? Is there detrimental weather? These are all things that will modify the DC against the party. You could shift the DC to the right as needed.

Does the wizard have levitate, could the wizard bypass the challenge completely with a teleport.

Everyone is so focused in on Chart 10-2 that by and large the rest of this section is being ignored.

Using the other charts as a reference makes chart 10-2 make a lot more sense.

A Cliff is a Level 2 challenge, if it has no modifiers, a bleeding Cliff! Discounting modifiers, climbing a cliff is really one of the more dangerous things a character can do. That means that your level 18 PC's scaling a cliff, even the piddly wizard if he so chooses not to waste a spell slot on it, are still rolling against the level 2 Hard DC, unless you as GM add some awesomeness to that cliff, and therefor, likely don't need to even roll, because they are over the level where the task becomes trivial. This is the kind of stuff people are missing in this discussion.

Do the Task charts need fleshing out, yes. They do. I unequivocally accept that, as there isn't a way to gage certain tasks because the charts all stop well before level 10. Is chart 10-2 the problem? Nope, they really want you to have a 50% chance to succeed an on-level Hard Task, because, well they are hard, and require a GM to put some actual thought into designing them.

Scythia wrote:

Syndrous wrote:

I think the chart is fine the way it is, due to the interaction with the ordinary tasks charts.

Since ordinary tasks fall to the point of eventually not being rolled, I don't think that Table 10-2 is even going to effect us as often as we thing it is.

Climbing a Cliff is the best example of this. It's a level 2 task according to chart 10-4. Depending on the adjustments that you apply the DC can range from Easy (9) to Ultimate (19).

At level 8, the task of climbing a cliff become trivial meaning you are no longer required to even attempt the roll.

The act of Climbing the Cliff requires a mostly static check, adjusted by circumstances. It doesn't use a scaling DC.

If that's the intent then they didn't present it very clearly. You're the first person I've seen mention this ordinary tasks chart in all of the discussion about skill DCs.

I've see it come up before and mentioned it myself. It's a good chart, and Syndronus is right about how it's to be used.

That doesn't make the current odds of success vs. on-level challenges okay though. Those are the DCs to be used when going up against equal level opposition, and the current odds of success an average PC can achieve on them are, frankly, pretty bad in many cases.

Now, Mark Seifter has said that they're probably gonna redo skill items (and/or make them more available) rather than change the chart, and that's fine if it works to change the odds of success (which it very likely will on the Medium DC level at least), but regardless of how the change is to be achieved, a change to odds of success on most PCs seems necessary.

I believe making the proficiency array - 4, 0, 2, 4, 6 will fix it.

Though a hard difficulty being capped at 50% +/-15% success rate seems fine, as that leaves us with two harder and two easier difficulty levels to use as circumstance dictates.

Treat this as an exercise in problem solving. Your players guide you through the way they solve an issue, based on their discriptions you determine the final DC, if their approach warrants a DC reduction, maybe you use the medium DC, maybe the hard or severe. The running the game section seems to be built more along the lines of general guidelines and a toolbox to allow GM's some wiggle room. We are all jumping on the DC's like they are static things, but there are a lot of role play opportunities that can be used to make some of them much easier from Aid Another to kits or items, to weather, magical shenanigans or out of the box solutions, we have been given tools that encourage our players to be creative in character to help over come problems. In fact, there are very few skill checks that I can foresee players having excessive issues on. Stealth is probably the worst offender in my minds eye.

I do want to note that Mark Seifter also mentioned specifically, in my other thread about this exact set of tables, that they used more of the difficult DC's in the table in Doomsday Dawn, which leads me to believe a normal AP will have considerably lower DC's.

I think the chart is fine the way it is, due to the interaction with the ordinary tasks charts.

Since ordinary tasks fall to the point of eventually not being rolled, I don't think that Table 10-2 is even going to effect us as often as we thing it is.

Climbing a Cliff is the best example of this. It's a level 2 task according to chart 10-4. Depending on the adjustments that you apply the DC can range from Easy (9) to Ultimate (19).

At level 8, the task of climbing a cliff become trivial meaning you are no longer required to even attempt the roll.

The act of Climbing the Cliff requires a mostly static check, adjusted by circumstances. It doesn't use a scaling DC.

I already liked wondering monsters and guards. This gives me more reason to bring them out to play.

I imagine Paizo will bake more patrols, and time sensitive missions to prevent the spam.

The issue with CLW wands were actually the speed of healing, not just the reliability.

I think the crossbow, much like the Firearm from PF1e, needs to target TAC. The crossbow is designed to punch through armor.

Additionally, can you fire a short or longbow while prone?

I would think that for a stealth encounter, a heavy crossbow would be prefered in instances where you can move move attack, or sneak sneak attack. The reload feats tied to movement can make a crossbow a good enough weapon.

But otherwise, in stand up fights, the shortbow wins at shorter ranges and the longbow at excessive range.

Syndrous wrote:

The lack of a confirmation roll means that there is a significantly higher chance to crit, coupled with the +/-10 shenanigans, means they cannot give you a significantly higher chance to hit monster AC without also increasing your chance to crit.

While I agree with this I think that it is worth pointing out that crits are also somewhat less, uh, crippling than in PF1.

In PF1 a crit by a major damage dealer generally finished off its opponent. Heck, crits by charging cavaliers or the like often killed their opponent in a single shot. That is less true in PF2 where everybody has lots and lots more hit points. It is almost expected that a boss will take at least one crit in a fight.

I disagree on the lack of impact from critical hits. Fatal, Deadly and the critical specializations make up for the lack of pure awesomeness in the damage department. Paizo doesn't care about letting us one shot enemies, criticals appear to have been rerolled to make them interesting.

I will agree that they are somewhat weak right now, critical specializations that is, but they have potential. Three of them knock you prone (-2 ac, - 2 attack rolls, +1 ac vs ranged), one makes you flat footed, one pins you in place, one enfeebles you, slows you, knocks you back, moves you 5 feet or causes persistent bleeding. Those are not useless effects, and while they don't necessarily end the combat, they are significant boosts.

I like riders over pure damage numbers.

Actually I think crit chance needs to be decoupled or more loosely coupled with hit chance.

The lack of a confirmation roll means that there is a significantly higher chance to crit, coupled with the +/-10 shenanigans, means they cannot give you a significantly higher chance to hit monster AC without also increasing your chance to crit. This means, that until we have better support systems in place for casting and inflicting penalties, we are held into a tighter hit chance that has to hover between 40-65% chance to hit, or our crit chance also jumps.

You should also consider that they are in fact listening, not to the forums, but to the actual data they are getting from the player base at large rather than the vocal minority they see here on the forums.

They may see our anger here, but the survey data may indicate that other issues are higher up the priority totem. I actually thought that the issues with DC's becoming lower in 1.3 was very likely for casters in addition to the skill benefits.

It may be that wizard, bard and sorcerer balancing may be coming after they get martial dialed in where they want them. I don't have a heavy horse in this race as I can build a fairly effective gish no matter how I slice it.

I think Paizo is right to relegate caster balance to the backend though. Not because full spell-focused casters need to be last, but because they are so bloody complex. Barb, fighter, pally, Ranger and rogue are easier to balance, and easier to fix if they break something. Casters meanwhile have a multitude of options, so much so, that all of the things that could cause issues with a pf1e game were caused by magic.

Everyother class in the game has a something they cannot do as well as others. I hate to be the one to go there, casters need to join that sphere. Casters need a definable weakness. Maybe each needs a different weakness.

Personally? Casters don't need to be nearly as strong as they were last go around. Do I have the solution to the problem? Nope, experience tells me that casters shouldn't have utility, cc and blasting in spades. Maybe split between them but certainly not on one chassis like they did last time.

Paizo has a super unenviable job right now. They need to give casters an identity, without making reality shifting casters a thing again. You wanna be a utility mage, great, your damage is going down the tank then. You wanna blast the opponent to kingdom come? Goodbye cc spells. There needs to be a trade off. At level 20 there needs to be room for the other characters to do something other than buying the wizard/socerer time, assuming the maxed out caster doesn't go first and just break reality and win.

I really don't think casters are going to be even 60% as effective as they were in pf1e and that is totally okay, because that puts them in line with the rest of the classes for ability to shift a narrative.

Are they lowballed right now? Sure, we can agree to that, but I sincerely hope casters don't get as much as they had going last time.

I think a system that spreads the ability increases out would also have the advantage of filling dead space, especially in the cases of classes that seem to have lame feat choices in their silo's. You still have the feat choice but now you have an ability bump that combines to make it feel better.

Spreading them out is fairly simple, just make the limit to break the 20 threshold level 10, and add a "natural" ability cap of 22-24.

It would allow slightly more specialization while keeping the diversified ability arrays that the new skill system seems to be build upon.

Edit: I do want to point out that I am 100% against an ability cap that is in the double digits modifier wise (so mods greater than +9) as that seems to make the spread between non-optimized and optimized characters pretty much insurmountable.

I think resonance could be useful but its current incarnation has negative gameplay value. Either you are not hitting it at all in any meaningful way and it winds up just being one more book keeping task when using consumables or you are an alchemist and you have to fight and game your way around it as best you can and its all hindrance with no real feeling of benefit.

The fact that items still have per day usages and charges to track after adding resonance baffled me. It would have been simplier to do the more limited things per day having higher resonance cost. Overall it is a system that just needs to be sat down and think what they actually want it to do.

I think they should stick with attunement for permanent items, drop the resonance cost on Alchemical Elixers and then remove the other set of healing potions. Finally, you make wands function by spending Resonance to activate it, and removing the number of charges.

This let's high level characters decide what items they want, allows Alchemists to provide out of combat healing or utility, and still makes Resonance a meaningful resource because it governs wands, staves and permanent magical items without harshly penelizing Alchemist or your 1 hp fighter who needs an emergency heal when the cleric died earlier in the dungeon.

A general mission statement does not make detailed design goals. A valid question would be "Why were spells so heavily nerfed in all respects (duration, effect, range, targets)?".

While there are enough forum members who will posit their individual opinion with great abandon about this (myself included), this does not equal an official statement by the developers in that regard. We don't know why they went this far, we don't know if a step back from this is even negotiable or if their decision is already cast in iron. All in all, we need more detailed information, on this topic and on many other topics of contention. In the absence of developer feedback, rampant speculation and discontent both grow unchecked.

Exactly so.

Paizo is taking a strange, to my eyes, stance on this. They are having us do a partially blind playtest, and feeding us just bare snippets of information we need to understand what direction they want to move the system in.

Magnuskn provides a great example, because we don't know the reason the power floor of pure casters was dropped its hard for us to brainstorm viable alternatives, we don't know more than a general mission statement.

I am in the military, I've learned that sometimes you have to hand out information to get an accurate result. The biggest example of this was the US Air Force recently had some issues with Gate Runner scenarios at multiple bases.

Big Air Force gave us a general mission statement, then a list of end goals for new systems were dropped by our unit commanders, then they asked us for solutions. This allowed us to evaluate what the good solutions were that fit both the mission statement and individual goals for our units.

Paizo needs to do the same thing here, we need the big picture and then we need some specific goals or objectives and we need to be told what is and is not on the table.

Right now we are dividing into small groups and tilting at windmills that might not be relevant.

I'm not a fan of +level to proficiency, I believe it invalidates other choices we make with our characters, but if Mark came in here and flat out posted that that bit was non-negotiable, I'd shush my opinion on that and move on to the next relevant problem in my eyes. I don't have to like every individual piece of the system, as long as I enjoy playing with the overall system, right now, I have a spiral notebook with around 100ish small to medium sized issues I have, and 10 or so big ones, but many of the smaller issues will resolve themselves if the larger issues are correctly handled, and 1 or 2 of the larger issues will balance correctly if a handful of smaller ones are corrected first.

Syndrous wrote:

master_marshmallow wrote:

Syndrous wrote:

Vidmaster7 wrote:

Ocean and syndrous you guys got it on the nose. Its what I've been trying to express we are most definitely not playing the finished product.

If your group can't handle the play test it might be best to just wait till the final product comes out.

I think about testing D&D next before it was officially 5th edition and I was ready to burn that thing.

My issue is I want to playtest, even if I am a player rather than DM and my players want to get out of what they see as a sinking ship at this point. One of my guys is a straight 5e enthusiast, he only played because I am one of 5 English speaking DM's where we are stationed. He worships the ground Matt Mercer walks on and believes that any DM style but Mercer's is badwrongfun. He has convinced them to move on to 5e, and revisit Pathfinder in 2-3 years if Paizo is still publishing.

I don't mind that, I really don't care for 5e, and half of my group just wants to play. Combined with me moving in December, I am mostly going to be building and running playtest with just myself and my wife. We both prefer PF1 and want PF2 to turn out well, we don't mind slogging through a broken system.

My only real gripe is that I don't see the point of play-testing a bestiary that is based off of design decisions that were a mistake, and that they had moved on from. We are providing them data that agrees that they were smart to move away from an iteration that was never meant to be published. They could correct that, any data they collect using the flawed bestiary is less useful, because it wasn't what was intended for the test.

This last part upsets me so much because classes that add in a second ability score, or otherwise get a scaling bonus that goes from +3 to +6 over the course of 20 levels literally fixes all the math and has no consequences for the 4 tiered success system because attack rolls don't have critical failures.

Adding

...

I'm the last poster in the thread.

Getting back to the topic at hand, of class-gated feats, I really feel they should consist more of in-combat tactical abilities, role-fulfillment abilities and thematically appropriate feats.

The Fighter for instance is supposed to be a master of in your face and tactical combat. Give the fighter feats that allow him to assume a tactical position and provide his allies with an increased benefit when they flank enemies that he is also flanking. The increased pool of reactions is a great baseline for Fighters, focus on more feats that expand on that concept, allowing more AoO's, or reactions to knock your teammates out of harms way. Hell, even the archery, dual wield, open hand, sword and board, and two handed stylistic abilities they have could be expanded on, if the classes focus was less as a weapon master.

Ocean and syndrous you guys got it on the nose. Its what I've been trying to express we are most definitely not playing the finished product.

If your group can't handle the play test it might be best to just wait till the final product comes out.

I think about testing D&D next before it was officially 5th edition and I was ready to burn that thing.

My issue is I want to playtest, even if I am a player rather than DM and my players want to get out of what they see as a sinking ship at this point. One of my guys is a straight 5e enthusiast, he only played because I am one of 5 English speaking DM's where we are stationed. He worships the ground Matt Mercer walks on and believes that any DM style but Mercer's is badwrongfun. He has convinced them to move on to 5e, and revisit Pathfinder in 2-3 years if Paizo is still publishing.

I don't mind that, I really don't care for 5e, and half of my group just wants to play. Combined with me moving in December, I am mostly going to be building and running playtest with just myself and my wife. We both prefer PF1 and want PF2 to turn out well, we don't mind slogging through a broken system.

My only real gripe is that I don't see the point of play-testing a bestiary that is based off of design decisions that were a mistake, and that they had moved on from. We are providing them data that agrees that they were smart to move away from an iteration that was never meant to be published. They could correct that, any data they collect using the flawed bestiary is less useful, because it wasn't what was intended for the test.

I would prefer this system to be honest. Tie some of the Feats that add functionality to weapons to proficiency and create a few feats that increase proficiency. This allows distinctive chatacter choices that increase both in game function and the individuality of a character.

They spent the time to add a proficiency function to the game, they should remove the pseudo BAB they have by adding level to rolls. Utilize the proficiency system itself by combining a proficiency multiplier to level or something similar to create distinctive modifiers that do not overshadow our ability modifiers (which seem to be capped at +6) and other bonuses we have access to. Or even just a flat systems: - 2, 0, +2, +4, +6. This would make proficiency matter more, as well as avoid overshadowing our other modifiers. They already have to rework a considerable amount of the bestiary so I don't think it's out of the question to adjust things like this at this stage.

Syndrous wrote:

Dire Ursus wrote:

What spells did he cast specifically? The more specific you are the better it will help Paizo.

Glitterdust, heightened Burning Hands, sleep and Gust of Wind.

He used a cast for Magic Weapon on the rogues shortbow when the rogue got pinned by a volley as well.

My primary point here is that a Wizard was completely invalidated by the saves of the creature. Save DC's are too low or creature saves are way too high. My Wizard had a spell DC of 18. That means the beastie beat Fort saves on a 5, reflex on an 8 and will on an 11.

Please note that 18 is the absolute highest spell DC you can have at lvl 4.

It really wouldn't matter what spell it was, targeting saves vs that critter was something that would go against the player very often.

Glitterdust is a weak level 2 spell if not used on an invisible creatures. Gust of Wind could have been good but the creature's best save is fort so unlucky. Sleep should have worked but the rolls weren't in his favour and Burning hands is an AOE spell but still should have dealt SOME amount of damage unless he crit saved which would have been unlucky. None of this stuff is indicative that the system is broke, just unlucky prepped spells and rolls. In fact this system is better if your rolls are unlucky because more spells still have effects attached to them even when you make a save.

He did do some damage on the burning hands, the sleep the critter made the save by 1, and it did crit save the Glitterdust.

My point here, is do we consider a 55% of success at best, an appropriate level of success for a Caster with only 2-3 spell slots per day of each level?

Truthfully, I would full stop say he over-reacted if the Casters got more than 3 spells per day (+1 in some cases, I'll grant you) if the Casters got 5 per day or 3 + casting mod per day of each level spell, I'm right there with you, that a 55% chance for a boss type encounter is acceptable.

But this isn't the case. My players rested after the Gnoll camp, he had everything available to him, and I honestly think that a few more slots would have made a big difference in how he felt, and how the Casters are performing.

I understand why he felt bad, and I typically don't play full casters, I'm a gish man through and through and have played every 1e varient of Magus I could build, including some esoteric combinations (here's to you spellslinger/gunslinger/magus combo). And I genuinely feel that 3 per level per day is waaaayyyy to few with the save severity we are playing with.

In my eyes, a 55% chance of success when optimally built is OK, if we have access to more spells per day.

My other gripe is that cantrips should either be a single action per turn or they should use the same system as Heal/Harm do, where adding actions adds range/# of targets/burst just to add some additional use to them.

He got up and WALKED OUT over ONE difficult combat? In a scenario meant to stress-test the system?

He was already upset because of how poorly his casting focused Druid handled in chapter 1. I didn't once claim the fellow was rational, or I agreed with him,

I am merely making the point that between his own reading of the rulebook and his in game experience with casters so far he was not impressed. Hell, of the 4 sessions I've played playtesting.

I had one group clear chapter 1 with no primary healer and almost no damage, then proceed to get demolished in chapter 2 but barely survive.

And then this guys group, who barely survived chapter 1 and didn't survive 2.

He was very unimpressed with the performance of the Wizard, and the overall utility and power of the spells in pf2e.

What spells did he cast specifically? The more specific you are the better it will help Paizo.

Glitterdust, heightened Burning Hands, sleep and Gust of Wind.

He used a cast for Magic Weapon on the rogues shortbow when the rogue got pinned by a volley as well.

My primary point here is that a Wizard was completely invalidated by the saves of the creature. Save DC's are too low or creature saves are way too high. My Wizard had a spell DC of 18. That means the beastie beat Fort saves on a 5, reflex on an 8 and will on an 11.

Please note that 18 is the absolute highest spell DC you can have at lvl 4.

It really wouldn't matter what spell it was, targeting saves vs that critter was something that would go against the player very often.

My group failed to finish because my wizard player got up and walked out of the session. A certain flying murder machine saved on every single spell that allowed a save and shrugged off the 3-5 damage per round from his cantrips. Meanwhile, it murdered the Cleric from range and then pinned the rogue with its final volley, before it proceeded to maul the sword and board fighter with no trouble.

This is the second party I have ran through chapter 2 and is mostly ttrpg experienced players. I want to point out that I followed the paths specific advice for the beastie... It prefers to fight at range.

The wizard player got up and left, and told me he'd be back if Paizo got its act together. All in all, my first group was the better experience.

I think the bestiary being dialed into hard mode might cause some issues.

Else magic is weak and both casters and martials are going to suffer for it.

Anyone else had a similar experience?

I'll be finished with the playtest this coming Saturday, due to my group breaking apart because it's prime moving season for my mostly military play group. We are going to run chapters 4 and 8 back to back because they want to finish the stories for their characters we started with. Emergency orders can be such a pain.

Out of curiosity, would using a proficiency system where proficiency level was both a threshold for a specific action as well as a multiplier to determine bonuses?

In example, you must be trained in Athletics to grapple, this is a specific action that requires some basic training to do well.

In order to determine bonuses instead of level + prof modifier, would the system work better as:

Untrained = - 2

Trained = 1/4*Lvl

Expert = 1/2*Lvl

Master = 3/4*Lvl

Legendary = Lvl

This gives you the following spread for proficiency modifiers at 20th:

-2, 5, 10, 15, 20

You then add your ability modifiers and bonuses.

A system like this also allows additional Feats to help with your attack routines or damage, to improve proficiency, and really differentiates the different levels of proficiency. If you prefer smaller numbers, in my head I really like: - 2, 2, 5, 8, 11.

It would require some major math adjustments, but personally I want proficiency to really matter.

I misread armor Hardness as functioning as Damage Reduction. When I realized my mistake during chapter 2 and attempted to correct it, my players threatened to leave because using Hardness as DR had made all monster damage numbers make sense.

I have yet to have a TPK but have had 2 instances of a Fighter going to Dying 2 and the Rogue and Cleric drop to <10% HP, even with using Hardness as DR on Armor.

Would it be going too far to considering scraping both the Background and Classes and adding a Primary, Secondary and Tertiary styles list?

I.E.

You chose Primary Divine Caster - this gives you access to 10 level of Divine Casting, a deity, and feats related to Divine Casting.

You chose Secondary Skirmisher - this gives you access to Light/Finesse weapons, dex to damage, Light armor/Shields and Light combat feats

You chose Tertiary Healing - limited channel positive energy, and feats that provide benefits for Healing/channeling.

The feat lists are gated by whether it's your primary, secondary or tertiary and you get ability boosts to whatever you need to build the character. This gives everyone a way to customize characters how they want and allows the Dev team to control access as well as balance around combinations. It would likely give us the best of Pf1 classes/feats and Pf2 power-creep control.

I'm wondering if the casters should have maybe targeted the goblin's Will or Fort rather than their Reflex.

Dex melee fighter is a trap in 2e I agree, but it was a trap in 1e too wasn't it?

There are quite a few Will targeting spells I think

I would not say it's a trap.

A trap requires something to look good or enticing. Dex melee on a Fighter chassis does not look good.

I would think that fully reading the Fighter makes it plain that the key Ability is variable for the melee versus ranged builds.

The Fighter makes no secret of its predisposition to melee strength builds, because it gets increased proficiency with heavy armors but not light armors.

There is only one class in the 2e that has good dex based melee combat, and that is a Rogue.

I think that Resonance would be workable if it scaled off of highest of Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma. That would alleviate the worst of the low lvl issues and allow lvls to scale it from there.

Pf1 did something I consider as a very bad thing, which was tell us that potions, wands and staves were common and unlimited use. I don't think that was a precedent they wanted to set and this is their attempt to alter that.

Resonance is a great concept, it just needs some work. Elixer prices might also need a good hard look. But if you changed Resonance to be highest mental ability score that should alleviate the worst of the low level bottleneck.

Well, just looking at the average damage per die tells you a lot.

Average damage of a d4 weapon with no bonus is 2.5 per roll, average of a d6 is 3.5 and d8 is 4.5.

The advantage of the dagger, a d4 weapon, is that it is easily concealable, has a thrown increment, has a second damage type, is finessable and most importantly has Agile. Agile reduces the multiple attack penalty to - 4 and - 8.

Now, this does mean that some of the d6 weapons are comparable to the d4 weapons, they too have Agile, however, this means for a character with no other way of reducing the MAP, an Agile weapon is better than a 1 point damage increase. So unless the higher damage die weapon has agile, the d4 weapons which I believe almost all have Agile, are superior.

The value of the reduced penalty to additional attacks is pretty insane. Due to the limited nature of bonuses, even when you factor in Potency runes, the weapon with Agile is going to produce more hits. The -8 alone, increases the chance of hitting a level appropriate monster by around 10%. That is a lot.

Now, if you are using a hit and run build, where you stride, strike, stride, then yes the d4 weapons will seriously fall behind. It really depends on the tactics you plan to use.

I'm not sure how many of you have tried actually running the Doomsday Dawn material yet, but I'm having extremely positive results in my local community and with my group. We are a fairly isolated community on a military base in Okinawa. Up until the playtest 5e was the only D20 system that was ran here.

The local community center is setting up to run the 2e Pathfinder playtest with as many tables as they can fill with new players.

My current group has also found the changes to be incredibly friendly to new players, it's actually possible to explain the game and play with new people now. My group had recently started to hate the rocket tag the 1e becomes and the fact that without an experienced DM a single optimizer can ruin the fun for a whole group. My group right now is a single power gamer, a rp guy who doesn't optimize, a kind of optimized experienced player and a brand new player. I've had much less trouble bringing my new player up to speed. There's some weird interactions and some polish needed still, but nothing to justify near the amount of complaining that I am seeing.

Some of you need to step back and play the game with your players before you rag on the system, keeping in mind that they rolled out the most extreme changes with the intent they be scaled back if they didn't work. They want your opinion having played the material, not theory-crafted the material into oblivion.

The change is about attracting new players to keep the game going, if they just keep the pissed off at 4e then eventually they won't have players any more. The 1e ruleset turned a lot of first time players off.

I read it through and it made plenty of sense. It wasn't intentionally set up to obfuscate. It was set up to tease concepts and then specify them for the he first few pages.

Granted I am currently brain dumping the entire pf1 and 3.5 ruleset I have ingrained into my brain, as it seems it's getting in the way of a lot of folks learning this system.