Witch of Miracles's page

AS I said before in a similar topic:

English is in a no win situation on this. There's no accepted singular gender-neutral pronoun, and singular "they" can engender misunderstandings (which is highly undesirable in a rulebook).

Maybe in twenty years, "ze" or something similar will be accepted by the public at large. Until then, well, we're pretty much screwed.

I think they hoped buffing cantrips would help compensate for this.

In my mind, the two classes are so similar, especially in the spell casting area, that I don’t known why one would opt to play a sorcerer. The two classes need to be delineated in much more specific ways.

As I saw it, in PF1, it was very nicely balanced between brawn vs precision-in magical casting terms. Besides the sorcerer being able to encroach on other spell casters magical traditions, the sorcerer seems very bland. I would prefer that they go back with being able to cast more but knowing less spells, than how the class is formulated now.

The class is in a very unfinished form and Paizo needs to do more work on it.

Sorc has better options for damage-increasing and DC increasing abilities. Sorc innately has more resonance, and access to occult, divine, and primal spell lists, whilst likewise being more flexible in their signature skills.

Why should a player trust a GM if the GM won’t trust the player?

The GM could be making a secret roll but thinks the player failing spectacularly is more interesting for “the story” no matter the roll. That sucks.
The GM could be making a secret roll and fail the check and just move the story onward. Accomplishing nothing but slowing the game down to roll for no reason. That sucks.

Fudging dice, and hiding rolls and difficulty is a great way to wallpaper over flaws in a game system, but terrible way to keep interest in a game as player have agency removed from their characters actions.

“Legolas! You find a secret door.”
“Why, I wasn’t looking for secret doors.”
“Your elf senses tingled.”
“Okay. Thanks for telling me. That was a thing that happened.

It's an eternal two way street. All games with hidden information require trust and a fundamental agreement to play by the rules. It's a social contract of sorts. If people find out you're breaking the contract, you get censured.

It's no different than trusting someone not to cheat at -any- game.

Funny that in the many games I've run for 5e, I've never actually seen two GW Fighters that were identical.

This white room analysis of 5e is very poorly done and shows a great misunderstanding of the system.

Even for two completely identical characters, say two variant human champion fighters with GWM, and the outlander background, both wielding great swords - those two can still be unqiue people just by putting in the tiniest effort of role-playing. All you have to do is think beyond the character sheet; don't rely on your character sheet "buttons" as the only options you have in game. This isn't a video game, and the mechanics aren't the end-all-be-all of the system.

When people talk about role-play vs roll-play, this is almost literally what they mean. Folks claiming that two characters are identical just because they share some of the mechanics together are those exact type of folks who miss out on all the wonderful role-playing aspects of the game. Don't skip that; there's a lot of fun to he had in that arena, and you can really bring out the flavor and personality of your character with it.

And if you don't believe me, then I challenge you to try it. Play a game where you're all required to play mechanically identical characters, and see how the role-play can make each of you shine in your own unique way.

This is willfully misunderstanding the argument. We all know the same statsheet can have a bunch of different personalities attached to it. That doesn't make it not the same statsheet doing the same actions. WE want mechanical diversity.

Secret checks are important for game integrity. They keep the game from being a solved question for the players. Trying to figure things out with limited information is part of the game. It's just more interesting when your players don't know the optimal choice.

And honestly, I think the biggest argument for secret checks isn't preventing metagaming: I think it's keeping the game from getting bogged down. A lot of perception checks, for example, just end in you telling people nothing. The game moves faster if you do them behind the screen. It also stops the whole "I want to roll to see if I notice anything," which is common at tables that don't do secret rolls for perception.

However, you can adjust what checks are secret based on your players. I'll let my Tuesday players roll stealth themselves, since I trust them to do the same thing regardless of success or failure, but I wouldn't do it with every table. I'll tell them to roll perception, more for suspense than anything, knowing my Tuesday players will carry on the same either way. In general, players feel more satisfied when they see their rolls and see the results that are happening. A lot of my players like narrating their results and feel happier when they have a hand in what their results feel like, which isn't possible with secret checks. I prefer to let them have that until they've shown they can't handle it.

All that being said, I think rolls for NPCs and monsters should always be kept behind the screen. It's just better for the GM, both from a gameplay and narrative standpoint. When the roll is behind the screen it lets you dramatize the rolls without letting them metagame. "He only missed by 1 -- that was close." And it also keeps players from nitpicking if you do bungle some math on your sixth cup of coffee (something I'm pretty sure every GM has been guilty of at one point or another). Even more importantly, it gives you a chance to show off the rolls that really matter: when you roll the enemy's save and they nat 1, when the enemy confirms their crit with a 20, that's when you show the players. When someone lives or dies based on your crit confirm, maybe you even roll it in front of all of them so they have the suspense as the die slows to a stop. You just lose these options if you keep rolls in front of the PCs.

Arcanist casting on Wizard just says, "I'm better than the Sorc at being a Sorc, because I can just change my spells known every day."

I am very glad Paizo is not making this error.

First of all, 2e seems alright. There's problems but somethings are really cool and are a much needed update from 1e. Honestly I feel as if the playtest is, overall, a step in the right direction.

That being said one thing I'm praying to Nethys to change is the nerfing of spells and spellcasters. I've been following the playtest ever since it was announced and have read the rulebook. At first I was pretty apprehensive because I saw that every spellcaster was being limited to 3-4 spells per day. I then looked through the spells and noticed that they are so weak compared to a basic sword swing(an unlimited resource that only costs one action) and this was the case throughout the first few levels of spells. A perfect example of this is Barkskin, a really good spell in 1e that is unusable in 2e. Why does it have a downside when it basically doesn't do anything? Why does the downside then increase when you heighten it? Why does it only last for 1 minute? I'm genuinely confused by its existence.

Another thing is why not give wizard something to make up for the fact its not even trained in simple weapons, not trained in any armor and is the only prepared caster that can't heal others?

Cantrips are significantly better than 3.x to compensate.

If you are using one handed agile weapons, how are you getting 1d12 damage dice?

It's called "I'm dumb/sloppy and edited my post later to hide how dumb/sloppy I was, but someone had already quoted it."

The mortal blow of forums

Gorbacz wrote:

Alchemaic wrote:

Instead of having training wheels for new players and letting advanced players take them off, everyone has to use a tricycle all the time.

Does the book come with a free advanced player to help you out? It doesn't. The product should be playable for a group of total newbies without being a minefield of trap options.

If new people will be faced with a game that is "best played when you're advanced, else you might shoot yourself in the foot", they'll instead opt for a game that doesn't have that (say, 5E) or a board game.

Or the book could just be printed without trap options. For some reason you seem to be assuming that people WANT there to be bad options.

It's basically impossible to print a book with both a lot of options and no bad options. The best you can do is just aim for printing no options that are unplayably bad, because some are just guaranteed to be worse.

Druid stuff.

Couldn't decide if I should include all the wild shape form spells you access with spell points... so I just did. Wild Order thus takes up a TON of space. Included reference to detect magic since Nature Sense references it.

Bard composition powers, first by "spell level" and then roughly in order of their appearance in the feat list or class writeup.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

EDIT: BAsically, power attacking is the equivalent of going to Vegas, playing roulette, and calling a single number over just calling red or black.

Not quite. In that case, if your number comes up, there is a huge payoff.

It's more like being able to double your money by betting on the right color, black or red, and there's a green slot so the house can stay ahead. You're always betting on black.

Then someone takes the time to count the colors on the wheel.

"Uhhh...there are 70 reds and 30 blacks. You'll make money over the long run if you bet on red."

"Ahhh...but you won't know what it will land on until the wheel spins!"

This is what I get for being lazy with my examples LOL

But yeah, that's more what I wanted to convey. ^^

Paladin champion powers.

Not sure what other stuff I should compile like this, since I haven't looked at all the classes terribly in-depth.

In general, their hope is to separate out people who are good at a skill by making them able to do things other people can't, instead of them having +30 over the next-best party member. They're aiming for Expert, Master, and Legendary characters to have more -breadth- of ability than characters that are merely trained.

In general, yeah, this doesn't fit with your vision as stated above. It does offer a few avenues to fix it, though.

1) As other people have said, fiddle with the math for proficiency on skills. Maybe only add your level if you're trained, or try any of the other proposed solutions here.

2) An alternate approach would be to gate skill uses further than they're gated RAW -- say, make walking a tightrope require trained or expert proficiency.

Title. I was going crazy flipping around and made these. They're ugly, but they work.

Cleric

Sorc

Wiz

Hope they're useful to someone else.

Really, my opinion is bolstered is the biggest problem. You used to be able to have your low level cleric giving people little bonuses when they didn't have anything better to do pretty much every battle, and the target being bolstered after one use shuts down that basic usefulness.

Guidance spam was a very real and annoying issue imo

If it's optimal to just have it on everyone until you get into combat, you just need to kill the option. Either remove it, or give people a more intuitive way to get the bonuses.

As it stood, you basically had to count rounds between everything at low levels because there was no reason to not have guidance up on everyone at all times

FTracer wrote:

There probably are some rough parts, but I was amazed at how many people thought they knew how to do it better in one day than two years of development.

Some people do.

It is worth noting that a lot of people, myself included, are still often reading the rules assuming things are true about the system that just aren't anymore. Our experience with PF1 is actually making it -harder- to understand PF2, because a lot of things we expect to be rules aren't anymore, or were subtlely changed to function a different way. (A really good example is rogue getting sneak on their first attack in combat -- it took a good two days for someone to point out that Surprise Attack + the new initiative system replicates this functionality. Almost all of us were getting hung up on how it seems like you can't attack without breaking Stealth as per hide and sneak.)

Having a lot of experience can sometimes be a detriment to understanding a new ruleset.

I have seen this come up on another forum.

A lot of the problem with this type of 'math' and other 'white room theorycraft' is it ignores 3 major variables.

1: Player choices outside of the targeted math.
Certainly power attack compared to magic weapons seems to be lackluster. What about 'Assists' from another player? If they are aware you are a power attacker and you don't hit often as you might want to, you can receive assists from characters who don't do much else during their turns. There are even ranged assists from other fighters, rangers, and rogues that take only a single action. This is a critical kind of variable.

2: GM actions.
Monsters aren't static piles of hit points in tabletop games. Every times i see something like this I have to wonder, "what if the monster is X and does Y?" What if the enemy is another PC based class? that changes variables wildly. No damage done is wasted against a monster because you may be facing weaker or stronger versions of the monster, and not all monsters of a given level will ahve the same hit points in any case. Resistance is a very real issue in the playtest.

3: Dice.
No math like this ever stands up to the actual test of rolling dice, because it can't. You can say "the probability of rolling this is this" but that doesn't matter because until the die is actually rolled, it's just a possibility - one of twenty of them as a matter of fact, and no amount of math and statistics is really going to change that.

There are plenty of people who can do this kind of math everywhere, but no one can say with absolute certainty what the players, GM, or dice will actually DO.

I know I'm not going to convince anyone who believes this of anything, but statistical averages are all you can use to balance a mechanic by in a game like this. You want to know how the mechanic will perform over the vast majority of cases; how well it performs in outlier cases isn't a good indication of its strength at all, since those outlier cases almost never occur.

BEsides, if you have to choose what to do, are you going to choose what might get you better results a very miniscule percent of the time but is worse the rest of the time? Not only that, will you choose an option that potentially locks you out of better choices? Power attack, -based on this math-, is both of those.

EDIT: BAsically, power attacking is the equivalent of going to Vegas, playing roulette, and calling a single number over just calling red or black

Maybe there's a middle-ground, Class Feats could be called Talents, Ancestry Feats could be called Traits, or something, as has been suggested many times, mix it up a bit.

I don't see much of a point when they're all the same thing at bottom. It might be more to your current sensibilities to have them named differently, but I look at PFs talents/exploits/tricks/discoveries and just go, "oh, these are class-specific feats." And all the racial stuff you get works out to feats in some way, etc.

It's just being more transparent about the guts of the system.

I think the only big variable missing from the calculation, on second thought, is how all this interacts with the new weapon properties like fatal, deadly, forceful, charge, and the like.

I'm not good at probability math, so I don't know how to calculate all this, but I'm curious if said properties make any differences.

EDIT: Well, that, and I think it's important to compare full-round output using good press attack options, rather than just the first two attacks. Weapon properties have a small effect on this, as well, but it's also important for comparing power attack to double slice etc.

This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see. Amazing work.

I don't spend a lot of time on the Paizo forums, so I've missed a lot, but I'm curious: did people dislike the process of investing in Skill Ranks each level? Was that unpopular? Thanks

I think they were trying to keep the party from being autolocked out of certain skill-based approaches to encounters and challenges. E.G., being unable to sneak into the dungeon because everyone is at like +3 (if that) except the rogue, who is at +27 between feats and items and a bunch of other stuff.

Anecdotally I've lost 5 players out of 20 to 5e, and the ones who remain keep nagging me to switch to 5e.

That's unfortunate. 5e is smoother and all, but I really felt like I had almost no control over the outcome of the game compared to PF. Seemed like I had to petition the GM to keep the game outcome from falling to the dice all too often.

5e does some good things, but it's definitely not what I hoped it would be from its popularity.

I haven't checked out the Rogue yet but I made a PF2 Ranger yesterday for the playtest and I was disappointed in the changes made there. Seems like they've nerfed the Ranger and pretty much made the longbow obsolete...hopefully that'll get ironed out in the playtest...

To be honest, it looked a lot like they looked at the slayer and were like, "oh, this is a Ranger that just doesn't suck" and ran with it.

1) Yes.

2) Kind of. It's hard to introduce to new people and it can be hard to teach people. I also feel like the game is a lot more complex than it needs to be in places. (I don't mind the flavor the complexity gives, by any means. I actually found myself missing odd-numbered ability scores as I made my character, of all things.)

3) I don't like 4e, but I don't hate it. It's just not really very DnD. 5e is playable but uninspiring. (Also f&+@ not being able to delay initiative.)

4) Looking for in transition from PF1 to PF2? I'd like to keep a lot of the customization and "textural" differences between characters while speeding up gameplay at the table.

5) Yes please. Accessibility and depth aren't mutually exclusive.

6) Some accessibility loss is fine. It's a sliding scale.

7) Sure.

8) Probably just a lot of the more flavorful options I assume were intentionally left out of the playtest. Also maybe a little more class stuff early on, but I'm not sure on that yet -- need to see the game in action.

you're still arguing that there should be circumstances that there MUST be a wizard and the wizard MUST have X spell prepared to coninue with the adventure.

that's terrible adventure design.

The feat is beyond excessive because the "good thing of wizard" is his ability to be flexible in his spell list and the "bad thing of wizard" is that your current spell selection may not be optimal.

a single level 4 feat obliterates that nagative for the majority of utility spells in the game.

Again, let's give sorcs the ability to swap their spells known within 10mins from whichever they want from a spellbook in their possesion. Seems fair right?

At no point did I imply the adventure should require a wizard. However, I did imply that a sane wizard would not go into combat with monsters with only charm person and comprehend languages prepared. If there's a wizard in your party, it's idiotic to take a wizard into a situation he's not prepared for if you can avoid it. You're basically down a party member.

The weakness wherein wizard doesn't always have the optimal spell isn't negated by waiting a day, since you will almost always be running on imperfect information and making some guesses and compromises at spell prep anyways. You are preparing spells that are 60-80% likely to be useful in most slots, and maybe preparing and one or two 20-30% spells. You're playing the odds and might get burned -- that's the right way to see the risk, imo. It's not binary. It's not "I've got the right spells and I'm set or I've got the wrong spells and I'm f$%@ed," because if you put wizards in that situation a lot, there's no reason to play a f$&*ing wizard.

You're also ignoring that this is a compensation for losing the ability to leave a slot empty, which was vastly superior to preparing a 10%-20% spell.

Anyways, re: Sorc vs. Wiz with this: there are a few big things that keep this level of versatility, in theory, from obseleting Sorc. One is that a Sorc is better at casting the spells they choose to take; they typically have better access to DC increasing effects, duration increasing effects, and damage increasing effects. The Sorc is also likely to be using these effects on the same 60-80% useful spells the wizard is preparing in most of their slots anyways. The second is that even if the Sorc knows a few of those 10% or 20% useful spells, they never have to use their spell slots on them; if the wizard commits to having that spell on a given day and it's bad, the slot is just useless. The Sorc can always reliably use all their spell slots. The last relevant thing I can think of is that Sorc also now has better access to ways to expand their spell list on the fly. (I also think the way spell heightening works is a net buff to the sorcerer for reasons I've explained before -- in many cases, they're getting spells for free through the spontaneous heighten feature when compared to PF1, like if you choose to have spontaneous heighten on summon monster. You had to take each level individually in PF1 anyways, so net buff. That's not wholly relevant here, though.)

But yeah, I think you're really making the situations too binary, losing a lot of nuance, and overall blowing things out of proportion. Quick prep is good in theory, but in reality it doesn't change a ton unless your players already have access to the perfect spell for the situation and can't just wait a day, which is rare. How many times did you know what the perfect spell would be after you woke up and prepared but before you were in serious combat? Even then, in how many cases would Quick Preparation have provided a solution not available with a "prepare later" slot or two in PF1? And what about the case with PF1 wizard where you take preferred spell as a feat and can just spontaneously cast an 80% useful spell with a 10%-20% useful slot?

You're making mountains out of molehills and thinking this level of flexibility is new when it already existed. (Also, arcanist could do this way faster in PF1 anyways...?)

Why would it be an improvement over have to wait a day for the wizard? If waiting a day has no downside then waiting a day is as simple as saying "we wait a day lol" and then you move on. If there is a drawback to waiting a day then that where quick prep is op. But to begin with I wouldn't allow them to wait a day because it's blatant metagaming. Don't they have a reason to press on? Even if they are just looking for fame and glory saying "meh I'll do it tomorrow" does not sound like that of a future hero. Remember, I wanted to challenge the group. The wizard not having the absolute perfect spell setup to get into the castle is what I wanted.

Imagine quick retraining. Each time I announce a castle siege the martials of the group takes 10 to retrain their skill sets to better suit the task at hand. The point of preparing spells is so you have to do a good job at well preparing for the tasks ahead. The point of retraining skills taking a long time is so that you can't just do it to always match the tasks ahead. For some reason I'm sure you wouldn't be fine with the lvl 4 feat quick retraining.

min per lvl buffs no longer exists.

Not having to wait a day has a lot of narrative benefits.

And besides, how is waiting a day metagaming? Do you think a wizard would agree to charge into a situation he's unprepared for, when he's largely useless with the wrong spells? ("Oh yes, I've got comprehend languages and charm person today, but we're suddenly being asked to raid a goblin den? No problem," said no wizard ever.)If you want your players to tackle a situation with suboptimal prep, they need a reason to do so that isn't "the GM thinks it's more fun." No one is going to knowingly do something stupid.

There are a few differences between feat retraining and spell changing. The most notable is that spell changing is already a part of the game that happens daily, while feat retraining is designated as downtime only. Changing from once a day to quick prep is a much smaller change than "downtime only" to quick prep. Secondarily, feats also tend to be optimal/useful in a wider variety of situations than spells, so there's a much lower opportunity cost to having the wrong one. E.G., Power attack is good whenever you want to smack someone; almost no spell, not even fireball or magic missile, is that level of always good. (Haste used to be, but wew lad that nerf.) Thirdly, if you don't have the right feat for a situation, someone else in your party is probably built to deal with said situation instead; but if you, the wizard, have the wrong spell, no one else can cover that weakness. You're just boned. There are plenty more dissimilarities, but I'll leave it at that.

EDIT: And I don't believe spontaneous got nerfed into the ground with the whole "need to know spells at heightened levels" thing. Spontaneous is better at their repertoire spells than prepared is, still has spontaneous heighten on two spells (which is more than enough for most builds, which only focus on one or two spells anyways), and now doesn't have worse acquisition timing on spells. Spontaneous also inherently gets more resonance from being a CHA caster, which is a big deal. I wouldn't say it's better than wizard, but I don't think it got the shaft half as hard as people think.

Even so let's think about the scenarios where it does help. When you wake in the city you prepare skills that are good in the city. As you set of in your wagon or whatever you prepare skills that are good on the road. As you sit outside the dungeon you prepare skills that are good in a dungeon. When you know you are going to infiltrate a castle before you get to the castle but after you prepare your daily allotment of spells etc. There are so many time where you can hyper specialize for the mission at hand. Think about the poor dm that is trying to challenge the group with some fun puzzle s+@@. By which I mean the puzzle of getting into a castle or some such thing.

Edit: lol the word filter randomizes each time you refresh.

Those are scenarios where every group I've been in legitimately just says, "we're doing this s+&$ tomorrow."

As far as I know, that's how that's normally handled. If your spellcasters don't have the right spells, you just wait until the next day, because that's a lot like being down a party member. If anything, the wizard changing out his slots like this is an *improvement* over having the entire party wait a day for the wizard.

EDIT:

Spending 10 minutes, even in a dungeon, is nothing. It takes that long to search a room properly. At best the wizard will just not help with the search and will change up spells.

Also something is overpowered if it requires the DM to be constantly thinking of a way to not let the player use it as printed.

10 minutes is a long time in any dangerous place -- especially in PF1 if you were trying to keep up min/lvl buffs. Searching for treasure after clearing the place has usually been eminently safer. Nothing here really changes that. Most of my groups would maybe do a quick glanceover of a room first time through, and not do a thorough search until it was obviously safe unless they had no choice and had to search thoroughly to advance.

Also, none of what I said is the DM trying to hard prevent abuse (preventing abuse would be more like the DM heavily regulating spell availability, etc., though that's not unusual anyways). What I talked about is just the DM playing the dungeon logically and playing the enemies like they have an INT higher than 2.

I'm tentatively in the camp that WIS is an underwhelming option because it apparently no longer gates your spellcasting.

It does a lot of good things mechanically (perception, saves, save DCs), but you can just opt to cast buff spells that don't need saves instead and just do better in combat. Not like cleric needs buff rounds before fighting anymore, either (rip divine favor). May as well just whack people and be a buff/utility bot.

This is just my kneejerk reaction, mind -- might be inaccurate -- but still.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

This is reaching a point where you just need the GM to use common sense (which is, admittedly, dangerous). You can't just sit around in a dungeon for 10 minutes while the wizard is meditating on his spellbook without consequences. Are there no patrols? Is there no wildlife? Hell, even if they acknowledge that, is the rest of the party going to keep escorting this maniac out of the dungeon so he can swap spells in peace every time the situation changes slightly? Continuously...

If you read the official AP's from Paizo, then the answer is "yes, you can totally sit all day on your duff in dungeons and do whatever, as long as you move three rooms back." Because monsters seldomly move from their rooms. The dungeons with active patrols and so on are very few and far between.

That's what I mean about common sense, though.

Combat is loud. Extremely loud. If you're forgetting that a lot of the dungeon has a shot of hearing you if you start clanging swords around, that's an issue.

Certainly, not -every- dungeon has active patrols, and not every dungeon has monsters willing to leave their rooms, but in the vast majority of cases, if an intelligent dungeon inhabitant hears combat, the party is probably going to end up on something of a timer as those inhabitants start moving to check it out. Same goes if they alert the wrong person. (I still well remember my party entering the boss room in Catacombs of Wrath first, then just getting slammed by everyone the boss could alert arriving in waves.) While it's also your job to exercise "don't penalize the party for making mistakes they couldn't have known to avoid," you've also got to play the enemies out in a reasonable fashion.

Also worth noting that if enemies won't or shouldn't leave their rooms, there's usually a good reason (forge at hook mountain is loud and full of clanging noises anyways, so enemies there probably wouldn't hear combat at the entrance; bosses taking time to buff once the complex is on alert; that sort of thing).

I feel like people are severely overestimating the amount of change in the rules.

A lot of the "changes" are a fresh (albeit very confusing, initially) coat of paint on the old rules. Even the fancy new action economy approximates the old action economy very well (while target buffing martial characters, even). I feel like --on a larger scale -- the two significant changes are really proficiency and class feature acquisition/progression rates, and everything else is a shuffle or tweak of what we already had. They really are trying to approximate the behavior of the old system while removing some pain points, imo, even if it doesn't look that way at first.

I agree that I dislike it. It makes new players think of the most painfully cliche fantasy tropes, instead of searching for other concepts, and it makes them think those cliches are good or even the default.

I do appreciate the metajokes shoved into those sections, though.

Unicore wrote:

I have been thinking about it more (some of which can be found [ulr=http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2v9zu?The-Unicorns-Reflection#2]here[/ulr])

And I think that 5 ranks of proficiencies is too limiting, especially when stacked with +1 per level.

I think there should be 6-8 ranks in proficiencies and skill increases should come every level for every character (with the rogue getting 1 extra every other level), and the default should be that you can only increase any one skill every three levels, unless boosted by a class feature.

Like the old skill feats, there should be general feats that give two skills as signature skills.

I think this would also allow for more creativity with feats that increase non-skill proficiencies, as right now, feats can only give training or expertise as static effects, which is pretty limiting.

Yeah, and quite frankly, having the difference between a completely untrained character and a LEGENDARY character be +5 (as well as all the values in between) is really underwhelming. Wow, my 15th-level rogue gets a +2 in stealth relative to a fighter of the same level's perception. A true legend of his craft.

To be fair, they're aiming for it to be a more qualitative difference than a numerical difference -- aiming to express skill mastery through proficiency-gated actions and activities over pure numerical outscale. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of those gated actions in the playtest right now, so it makes the distinction between legendary and trained characters look a lot smaller than it likely will be in the final product.

I strongly agree the rulebook is not pleasant to read. If I am looking up something after I understand the game, this organization is good, even great. However,while I'm trying to learn the game? It's complete suffering. Having to flip to the spells section and back to compare my wizard school powers or cleric domain powers is just unenjoyable. Is it more consistent to have them with the spells? Honestly, yes. But is it better for a first read? Hell no.

In general, the rulebook has a lot of things not-where-they're-relevant, but instead has them in a database of all the things of that kind, and you're constantly told to refer to that database. It's very logical but exceedingly dense and frustrating. On a first read, it violates the same design rules that make web designers try to make everything take as few clicks as possible. It's exhausting to read through even a single class, because you're sent to the far corners of the book -multiple times- to read even a single page. I do not like it very much.

I think it is a good point being made here.

Essentially, why are we getting these lingo-esque words mixed into our abilities. It makes reading the book really confusing.

(Actually the poster above me said it better. The book isn't fun to read.)

Basically, clarity. When done properly, adding jargon makes intent clearer and helps close gaps between RAW and RAI. Unfortunately, when the jargon is unintuitive, the results are very offputting.

I don't feel the jargon is clear or intuitive right now. A lot of distinct keywords gloss as the same (unseen and concealed, deadly and fatal), and the keywords aren't even always identifiable as keywords because they're rarely capitalized or bolded. In fact, the first time you see a keyword, you might not even know it's a keyword -- and that's bad. Even if you don't know its meaning, it should be obvious a keyword is a keyword.

Just something to tell your players, "buy this and move on with your lives."

Because god, I'd forgotten how tedious manually figuring out all the crap you need is.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Initial responses are typically based on initial impressions.

Unfortunately, the initial impressions for the system are really, really misleading. A lot of the things they did to make the system more unified/consistent made it so the rulebook A) looked like 4e to a lot of people and B)had things organized so that it's hard to understand how any one part of the game works without reading the whole thing. That is going to provide a very bad first impression to a lot of people, regardless of what the system is actually like.

but if Paizo wants to sell their products, first impression matters. Imagine seeing this in your local game store without prior knowledge. Would you buy it after having a quick read through it? I'd think that this book is the illegitimate hate child of 4E and 5E and put it back on the shelf, embarrased to have even looked at it.

I wholeheartedly agree that it's a failure on their part to have the product misinterpreted so heavily on the first day.

I'd be shocked if they didn't feel like the benefits of 4e-like formatting outweigh the risk in the long run, though. Spells are certainly a lot easier to read than they used to be, at the least.

To Dire Ursus

No offense but if people are having a hard time getting excited about sometime, that is usually because something is making it not exciting. That's not bias, that's a normal human reaction, saying to them something is wrong. I will admit actually playing the game is better still, but I still trust my instincts, as everyone should.

It's life, no mater how much you love something not every is required to do so. Did you you ever hear the saying "One mans fun is another's He.." (Heck, no profanity but I guess you can get the point.

Initial responses are typically based on initial impressions.

Unfortunately, the initial impressions for the system are really, really misleading. A lot of the things they did to make the system more unified/consistent made it so the rulebook A) looked like 4e to a lot of people and B)had things organized so that it's hard to understand how any one part of the game works without reading the whole thing. That is going to provide a very bad first impression to a lot of people, regardless of what the system is actually like.

By and large, I feel like a lot of the stuff the makes the game feel like 4e is just in the presentation -- old rules are being presented in a new format that LOOKS very 4e, when they're honestly mostly the same as they used to be.

For example, I think one of the single biggest culprits for it "feeling" like 4e is the way things that used to ride on top of other actions (like power attack was a part of an attack, or sneaking was a part of moving)are now their own individual actions (Power Attack action, Sneak action). Toss in the new formatting, and there you go! It looks a lot like 4e. New Power Attack? I'm just choosing which of these at-will powers I want to smack people with! Oh, Combat Grab. I can do this, or grab someone instead, or just strike normally! More at-wills. However -- and this is important -- it's still mainly just stuff you already did presented in a different way. When you understand that, a lot of the "this is 4e" facade melts away, imo.

The proficiency bonus scaling, though, that I understand as feeling very 4e. But I think that's about the only think that's actually similar between the two, at bottom. Most of the perceived similarities other than that are, well, just that -- only perceived, and not actually there.

This seems like a case where you're losing out overall, flavorwise. For every mediocre TN worshipper of Sarenrae you cull, there's an interesting and well-thought out one, too; and just slapping more alignment restrictions on a deity isn't going to make people RP their character's connection to the deity better.

There might be some good balance gains to be had, but I don't feel like you gain a lot of narrative depth from the change. You sacrifice breadth of possible experiences for focus, which I'm not a huge fan of in a system that should naturally skew towards replayability.

It's worth noting that a lot of heightened spells mimic spells with greater/lesser or tiered versions in 1e. For example, heightened summon takes the place of summon 2-9, 4th level invis takes the place of greater invis, and so on. This change is pretty power neutral for the Wizard, who could just know a ton of spells anyways, but Sorc is MUCH better off than 1e in terms of the value you get from knowing Summon Monster, Invis, and other spells like them. On top of that, the two spontaneous heighten slots are enough to cover your build's main strategy most of the time, anyways (be it fireball spam, summon spam, or whatever else).

The above is really important. Sorc gets a lot more bang for their buck on the spells they choose to learn in this edition, and Paizo is probably playing it cautiously.

Blink is super-gutted. Good riddance, imo

We already kinda knew this, but Shield is also gutted even though it's now a cantrip. (Also good riddance, imo)

A lot of lower level evocation spells seem better at the time you take them (burning hands is 2d6, Shocking Grasp is 1d12).

Glad to see summon monster nerfed but not removed. Spell did far too much and slowed down play at the table horrifically when abused. It's still going to be good, just not a free contender for best spell anymore.