Wultram's page

You'd think that this new system has already been tested far more than the original Pathfinder was, and we still love that system despite its warts - none of them ended up stopping us from playing it, and it seems like the new system has already fixed quite a few of those niggling issues from the past.

You can essentially count whole 3rd edition(3.5 at minium) of DnD as a playtest of PF1. And no mistake about it as a game PF2 is nothing like what came previously in it's lineage.

Personally I am not optimistic.(Granted my pessimism started with the preview blogs and hasn't gone anywhere.) I simply do not have the blind faith that the devs seem to be asking. "Yeah we are fixing a whole lot of things." Yet not saying how or even what. Paizo doesn't have a track record in the same solar system that is needed for me to trust someone selling me something. I understand that there are certain factors that make it difficult to be fully transparent, but I don't need it all. I would be perfectly happy if in January we got a proper explanation on what are they working on and to what end. So I know if I should keep even casual attention to this.

Time for Krezent(at least up to split.), the rest will have to come from the other group as I am purposfully keeping myself in the dark about what the other group is up to, outside of very big picture.

- After the celebrations of victory was concluded, Bokehn more or less said that there are some people to we should meet. Party more or less assumed this would be the dragonmarked house due to his affiliation. Figuring the airship would be the fastest way out of the jungle anyway we agreed.
- Rehil became VERY upset due us not going to check Da'Shet as promissed. To the point of suggesting we take over the airship. Some were outright against the idea while some were reluctant, in the end that idea was abandoned.
- Everyone refused to answer where we are going. Frustration grew among some in the party. Some started to consider this a soft form of kidnapping.
- Arrival at Krezent. Some of the greeters were rather stuck up, again some people took offense. At the same time the party learned the place is massivly religious towards the silver flame.
- The party was shown to a place to have some rest and eat. There was some discussion and the general sentiment was that lets at least hear their suggestion.
- The talks, here is when things started to get ugly. On the other side of the table were some high officials of the city, Bokhen and two other people(later revealed to be dragons from The chamber). They more or less wanted to know what happened, while being arrogant and disrespectful. Tal left the table first considering the suggestions made dishonorable. Wultram left next, frustrated with the constant disrespect and being talked down to, considering these people absolute morons and as such people who should not be worked with.
- I don't know what discussion happened after Wultrams departure.
- Later rest of the party manages to cool the leaving pairs head somewhat.
- Majority of the party notice local guards keeping an eye on them. I think at least Wultram threw some insults their way. At this time the party is split across town each doing whatever.
- Some of the party visit the local library to get some sense to the ritual that they witnessed but nothing of substance was found out.
- There is part of the draconic prophecy in the caverns near the city so some want to check it out. Soon the party finds out that you need permission to go to the caverns.(by then we had noticed the city is very much LAWFULL one.)
- So the party goes to head of the guard(actual tittle might have been captain) to get said permission. Wultram and I think someone else too do not agree to the term of having an escort(him/they consider them spies.) Talks get heated and the party leaves without permission.
- Some representives come to the partys rest location, essentially making an ultimatum of making an oath of not harming anyone. Wultram declines on the account of it preventing self-defense as well. City basicly says then GTFO. Tal is pretty quick to go with Wultram.(He didn't have much better opinion of them) Rehil offers to go with.(iirc some of this might have been meta reasons as well.)
- The party via some secret messages agrees to meet at Regalport.

Again reading the actual posts will get the complete picture and I am sure my memory messed some of that. Still that should give the big picture. I wish I could remember which character had which opinion on what, I recall some but decided to not write them down in case my memory is false.

Well now I feel like I don't even need to but short versions untill you get the time to read Rehils links. Everthing is from pure memory so mistakes are likely. For now I am just handling the 1st chapter of the campaingn, I would consider it the most important to know plot wise, where as Krezent is important for getting to know the characters.

Jungle adventure:
-the party members(at this point we weren't a group) were hired by House Tharashk as sellsword for a trip into Q'barra along a river to see why shards aren't coming as usual. The settlement was thrashed when we got there, during investigation lizardfolk attacked. They decided to wake up a Dragon turtle(later turned out to be mythic one) to f&@! shit up, our boat is sank.
- Trek through the jungle, Bokehn(our direct employer in charge) gets badly sick, he knows of a tribe that should be friendly so we start heading there. The tribe(this is where the PC lizardfolk come from) did indeed turn out to be friendly.
- The tribes leader tells us that the other tribes are riled up because humans(though later found out that most lizardfolk don't really distinguish say human from an elf. So we can't be sure if it was literally humans) have been messing with their holy sites. Party decides to investigate.
- At some point the party is forced to surrender due to downed people essentially being held hostage. So the party is taken to the leaders. The party tries to convince them that we are a seperate group and that we haven't been messing with their holy sites. Some political parties are just itching to start a war so to them it doesn't really matter if we are responsible or not. We try diplomancy, but the dice apparently hate diplomancy as the rolls iirc were 1 and 2. Result is that we are being 'sacrificed' to some sort of beast of religious significance. Due to beating said beast the leaders can't just outright kill us, from what I recall because it is a holy beast and we would not have succeeded if the gods/spirits/whatevers didn't want it so.
- The party makes some alliances among the leaders there and essentially arrange that if the current leadership is taken care of it is replaced with more favorable one to us. Party proceeds to sneak in and fight to achieve so.
- Party goes to Da'Sheth, large mercenary group is there. The partys sneaking and attack fail miserably and have to retreat. Once the party returns the mercenaries have left via airship. The party finds an obelisk of some kind with a dragon strapped into it. The party tries it's best to investigate what the hell it is, but doesn't get far. Soon enough there is an explosion followed by visions of supposedly silver flame.
- The party wakes back up in the friendly tribes village. The dragon turtle from before is causing issues so the party and the village set up an ambush. Victorious the party heads towards the beasts lair where they find some loot and another vision.

Alingment is tool for those who aren't willing to put in effort or have real trouble with imagination. It and any other sort of morality mechanics are the worst thing that has happened to the entire hobby in it's history.

But humans are lazy by nature so it endures. Hell as much as I loathe the entire idea and won't ever play a game that uses anything of the sort, I still use something akin to it when I GM for shorthand on personalities of minor NPCs.

Wultram wrote:

Because it doesn't make any damn sense?

Really? For me, saying "This spell is only available to this NPC" is pretty much like saying "No, you cannot play as a gelatinous cube".

I mean, there's no reason that all abilities must be available for PCs.
Of course, spells have quite an esoteric flavor on them, so this wouldn't happen with science.

I think the tone didn't carry too well in my first post. I am opposed to the "no this is impossible" type of can't. Yes an npc may have an ability that nobody else knows, but it should not be impossible to learn it for anyone that is their equal.(what equal means depends on what we are talking about, a human fighter may be just as skilled as a catfolk one but if the technique uses claws, well then equal includes actually having claws.) And even if whatever thing is unique, well it came from somewhere so it is at least in theory possible to use the same excat method as the npc used.

Wultram wrote:

Seems decent enough. Though there could have been a lot more meat to this blog post, how hard would have it been to give a good amount of examples. That being said my major concern is the return of. "Oh yeah this npc totally gets to do this thing, and no you can't learn it." Now just masked as rarity.

You act as if they is inherently a negative thing. It isn’t. There are some(maybe many thibgs) that an NPC knows that a PC will never be able to know. I could see a great many things taking a lifetime to learn, or many years and access to great libraries, etc.

I guess I just don’t even get this comment.

Because it doesn't make any damn sense? And that GM fiat is bad and anything encouraging it is bad game design?

Just and example NPC wizard level 5 had a rare version of lightning bolt spell they came up with, let's say it works like the from times of old that bounced of things. Now we have a PC wizard level 20, he decides to research such a spell, nope can't do it. No matter that you are working of the same magic and that you are vastly more knowledgable and skilled on the subject. Or let's say it is a martial feat some sort of sword technique. Assuming the npc and pc are both of the same race, they follow the same laws of biomechanics and as such they are able to execute the same excat movement required for the technique. Verisimilitude is important. All that said important part of that statement was using it as an excuse, basicly hiding GM behavior that should not be tolerated.

Again more than bit late to the party, but this blog started up a serious discussion among my group if we even want to playtest PF2. Granted it just happened to be the one to ignite the flames as the class happens to be a favorite among one of the group. All the same that should still say something about the quality of this. Personally I am willing to at least read the full playtest document before making that judgement even if I am very pessimistic at this point in time.

All the same let's go over this thing that I would call something lot more colorfull without fragile sensibilities.

1) Spell lists: The basic idea of bloodline deciding your spell list is a good one that I 100% support and like. Problem is that someone got the bright idea that a class based system can function with 4 spell lists instead of going MORE custom than PF1. So in short good idea horrible execution.

2)Bloodline format: Why does your heritage matter as far as what skills you have learned in your lifetime? Doesn't make a whole lot sense to me. Okay adding in spells is good if you got to go with fixed spell lists.

3) Gluttons jaws: Melee bloodline powers sucked in PF1 and they still suck. Yay my most defining mechanical aspects effect at level 1? I got a slightly upgraded dagger that has limited uses. Oh and it takes 2 actions and has miserable duration. Ok I can understand that sometimes you write total filler, still makes it bad job but understandable. But the fact that this is in the preview where presumably you would want to put forth your best foot? This doesn't excatly fill me with confidence in the devs.

4) The bloodlines in the playtest: Not the ones I would have chosen but this is pretty much personal preference and nothing else.

5) Casting: Well here is the part that at least to me makes this whole thing absolutely worthless. There is absolutely no reason to play a sorcerer compared to a wizard assuming the same spell list. You decided to get rid of automatic scaling and replace it with heightening and here you see the results. The only positive change here is getting rid of the delayed spell access. But inside of this system spontanous casting is dead. The fact that something called spontanous heightening is actually prepared at start of the day, would be hilarious if it wasn't such a massive failure of game design.

6) Hype speak is back in this blog and it is still annoying as hell.

Well first credit when credit is due. This blog was written in the best fashion so far out of all of them. While there was still little of that hype speak that I despise, the vast majority was relevant to the actual matter telling us how things work.

Now to the actual content, I will write these in the order they appear in the blog.

1) Envioremental hazards and traps sharing formating is probably a good decision.
2) Good to see that detect magic has been taken into consideration from the get go.
3) Yeah I am not a fan of this idea of "need to be this tall to ride" when it comes to profiency. It just seems completely arbitary, without any real benefit. Like it can make sense in some cases, but perception certainly is not one of them. Personally if it makes into the final product and I actually decide to go with PF2 that stuff is getting thrown out.
4) Multiple skills are good. Though I would add in that some traps might require multiple skills to disable not just more than one option. Also it should be possible at least with some traps to say use Knowledge engineering skill to give a bonus/aid another for the one using disable device.(example uses pf1 terms.)
5) So the pit trap. I have surprisingly many issues with this one. First there should be a weight limit to what triggers the trap, or just a mention that the creator has to set one when making it. Then why does it have AC in the first place? Not like you can crit it so that isn't why it is needed. Also 10? Really a character has non neglibele change of missing essentially what would be a big door on the ground. Even just touching it is equal to dex 4-5 creature, you know something that actually moves. I have issue with the damage too, not that 10 damage isn't suitable for CR 1 trap, but that 20ft is 10 damage. I know that falling damage in PF1 wasn't the greatest, but that is ridicilous amount. For 30ft maybe that is suitable. Oh and the same argument that was made for AC can be said about reflex save, it should just automaticly fail them.
6) Well first, yeah this sort of fluff is excatly the type of fluff that is pointless and waste of word count. Hell in this case it is actually harmfull. First Golarion, ugh get that out. And how excatly does thievery skill allow someone to channel gods? On the mechanical concerns I am not really sure this is CR 23. There really isn't something to over come here. You may be stopping collater damage but there isn't anything to challenge the party. And for such a plot device thing, it's damn boring. Either the resident trap monkey makes their roll or not, and they have fire resistance or not. Only thing I like about this thing is the 100 mile radious. The basic premise has potential but the execution is a total failure as far as I am concerned.
7) First let's note that this is not going to get a fair shake most likely. I loathe haunts and I think they are a stupid idea. Either it is a spirit and as such a creature and follows the rules for a creatures or it is a trap which means it isn't a creature and as such it isn't a spirit. And considering I do not see the option of showing a pointy pieace of steel that can affect such creatures it seems to have failed again. Not a big issue to me personally, easily thrown out with rest of the houseruled garbage. With that done let's look it as purely trap. Otherwise this seems good, but to me it seems dumb to base the damage on weapon wielded, you can't really strike yourself with the same success as you can an enemy, since not surprisingly they were designed to hurt other people, with some weapons it is almost impossible. And game desing wise it seems to add in a random element that totally changes how dangerous it is.
8) Mostly good, but this really needs some additional info and limitations. What makes it move? Why can it move anywhere instead of being limited to certain area? Also why is this immune to critical hits? Such a contraption most certainly would have weak spots.

So all in all not that bad, good amount of polishing needed but this is pre playtest material so that is to be expected to a degree. Only exception is haunts but I was never going to be a convert on that issue.

Well you still haven't shown it would be easy to actually fix. I don't believe giving someone with a Cloak of Elvenkind infinite invisibility is less of a mess than Resonance. In fact that seems like it would break the game beyond repair. So yeah I called BS, because it obviously isn't easy.

Something being tedious is not the opposite of easy. I do not consider myself particularly good at messing with rules, outside of just having lot of experience. But I still fully believe that I could do better than the mess that resonance is. Would likely take me rather long because like alignment(in pf1) the stupidity is ingrained into the system. But from what we have seen so far I do not see any single issue/item that would take me more than an hour to fix, more like 10 minutes to come up with something better.

Now regarding the actual wands. If we are forced to use level aproriate wands even outside of combat. Well in PF1 wands cost 15 times more than same level potion and converted into pf1 money 15th level potion is 12k so the wand will be 180k, or 75% of WBL of a single character. Assuming 4 man party that is bit below 19%. Of coarse that is lot of assumptions to make but if that is true, yeah mandotory healer role is back.

Wultram wrote:

Malk_Content wrote:

Wultram wrote:

Oh and for the record I could EASILY I might add to figure out a system that replaces resonance without f#%*ing up things, hell simple remove completely is better than having it. But until the actual game comes out, and I decide that this company still deserves my money I will not put in the effort.

Every one is a game designer, until of course they actually have to design something.

Hell the first answer is right there in the quote. Remove it completely. Better than the current situation. Opinions may wary, but to me this is an absolute. It is the same as alingment firearms, crane wing nerf, crossbows, shifter. If someone is diametrically opposed on any of those points with me, their opinion to me holds no value on game mechanics. It is such a fundamental difference in thinking that there can never be any sort of compromise to be had on any significant matter.

Of coarse if you really want to, I happen to be on vacation so drop me a weeks pay and a full copy of the playtest and I can put where my mouth is. But I doubt anyone is willing to do that, so you are just going to have to my word on it.

Alright, so now you have to rebalance all of the items that use Resonance (all of them) so you've not actually fixed the system. You've jut torn it down and left nothing in its place. Thats like a Revolutionary who has no idea what to put in its place once they've torn the government down.

And yeah I'll front you the cost of the playtest book. In fact I've already done it! Because the book is free. But no I'm not going to pay you to fix problems you have with something that I don't have.

Alight it seems I wasn't clear there. First I am fully aware just simply removing resonance would have massive ripple effects. I am saying those ripple effects would be the lesser evil than the mess that the system is in the first place.

And yes I am aware that the playtest PDF will be free. But I am not on vacation when that comes up. And I have little reason to make the effort of fixing the system untill I see that playtest and more so the final product before I decide to use the system. Point of the comment was that in the current situation it is impossible for me to fix said system even if I wanted to, well fix it to the level that I would find acceptable. It wasn't me that decided to call BS on someone elses statement.

Wultram wrote:

While he above is true, it is completely false that you can't see a mechanic is bad without playtesting it. I certainly have never allowed sacred geometry at any table I have run, precisely because I saw without testing it, that it it is broken as all hell. I would really like to see someone have a hint of reasonable argument for needing to playtest it.

Sacred Geometry is a much simpler rules interaction than an entire subsystem, and removing it is thus a much lower impact change. There are House Rules of a similar sort you can use in the playtest without radically reshaping the system (not letting people get to Legendary in Skills, for example, is fairly low impact)...but Resonance is not such a change.

Every item in PF2 is balanced around Resonance and its interactions with that resource. Getting rid of it before finding out exactly how that interaction works f%+&s the whole system completely, and any fix you come up with without even playtesting it is not gonna be sufficient to keep that from happening. It's as major a change as saying 'Let's just playtest this without magic items at all.' and that's not a valid test of anything.

And I noted in the same post that for playtest data to be in a format that can be digested, you have to stick to the norm. Naturally superior playtest would allow for this but resources are limited and as such it isn't reasonable.

Only reason I used sacred geometry as an example is that I consider it the same level of screw up as resonance. You may change it with firearms rules if you prefer for a wider subsystem that sucks.

Oh and for the record I could EASILY I might add to figure out a system that replaces resonance without f%*%ing up things, hell simple remove completely is better than having it. But until the actual game comes out, and I decide that this company still deserves my money I will not put in the effort.

While he above is true, it is completely false that you can't see a mechanic is bad without playtesting it. I certainly have never allowed sacred geometry at any table I have run, precisely because I saw without testing it, that it it is broken as all hell. I would really like to see someone have a hint of reasonable argument for needing to playtest it.

Anything in the playtest is not excempt from this. Sure for best results everyone needs to follow the same rules to get data in easy enough form to digest. Of coarse if we make the assumption that a mechanic is so bad that it ruins the entire game, then you will just get feedback about that one mechanic and any other issues that might have otherwise been noticed might not get the attention they need.

But really if this issue really needs to be solved. Then you just have to make a distinction between out of combat healing and in combat healing as those 2 are totally different functions and goals. As such they should not have the same resource cost.

Wultram wrote:

But resonance is a bad mechanic and has no business being in professionally made product. I am not especially good at homebrew but given a week I could come up with dozens of better solutions. I expect someone who is getting payed to manage better than that.

See, this is something i was discussing with a friend of mine... This idea that the professional designers, veterans in the field, have no idea of what they are doing.

Resonance is a mechanic designed to set the pace of an adventure, to make other things beside the spell caster's resources the attrition factor in a party. It limits ALL magic in a way, so you can't simply blow through an adventure in a day using dozens or hundred of spells "in a can".

If that mechanic is useful, if it works as intended, we can discuss that. But saying that the designers simply don't know what they are doing, that they work could easily be changed by anyone that bothers to write a quick homebrew... Well, that's both mildly insulting to the people hard at work in paizo, and an overstatement of the skill of any random poster in the forum.

No but they most certainly can mess things up and have done so in the past. Oh and concerning some employees of paizo that I will not name out of courtesy that is more often the case than not. But let's go over some examples shall we?

1) If you can take 10 should be determined if GM thinks it will enhance drama. Oh and that is what the rules say.(Hint they don't)
2) Shifter
3) Crossbows are equilevant to waterballoons as a weapon.
4) Caster/martial disparence is a myth, spread by people with agendas.
5) Firearm rules
6) How improved natural attack works basicly was handed them on a silver platter by the community when they couldn't figure it out.

I could name more but I think that is sufficent proof that the devs have less than perfect track record.

And for the record I said nothing about any old random poster. I was talking about me personally. And I said what I meant given a week of full time working on the issue I could come up with a better solution. I just clarified that I do not consider myself good at making homebrew. To me someone who does this for a living should not be anywhere close to that level of producing content.

I never claimed them to be lazy either. I just simply called resonance an utter failure of game desing. And that is what it is as far as I am concerned. Given that I have yet to see even something that has made me think. "Yeah I suppose you can look at it like that, still don't agree but at least I can understand that POV." I am fairly certain it is not just my personal bias that came to that conclusion.

So outside of 1 staff in the art, there is nothing good or even decent about this blog post.

Poor formatting of items. Unnecessary complication. Uninteresting items. Poor pricing balance from the limited quantity seen.

Oh and the big one resonance. It has nothing salvagable, when I saw the shifter I thought that was as bad as it was gonna get from Paizo after firearms rules, but nope. This is based on false premises, with bad conclusions and even worse execution. People have gone through all the faults in the system and even the basic idea of it before this blog post so I will not repeat them here. But suffice to say that if resonance makes it in any way or form into the final product, it's a deal breaker.

Wultram wrote:

This mostly a personal peeve, but I really hate how the blogs are written style wise. I do not care for the conversational tone. Just give the information in a solid easy to see format.

AFAICT they're really meant less to inform than to excite. The devs may write them, but I always get the feeling the VP of Marketing is watching over their shoulder with a gun to their head: "More exciting! More! What's that thing at the end of that sentence?" "A period." "Make it an exclamation point!"

(Fair's fair, this particular blog isn't bad about exclamation points. Too many of the rest are.)

I personally belive it is a bad approuch. I am relatively sure that the vast majority of people reading these are PF1 players, and inside that most probably won't really get any more nor less excited by hype speak. It is just completely wasted effort, and waste of time of the readers. And I am sure it is marketing and limitations on what they are allowed to reveal that is causing the issues. All the same for my tastes the style of writing chosen on these preview blogs is annoying and if anything it will make me less likely to give the company my money. I will grant you that this was hardly the worst offender of the blogs. All I am really doing is voicing my opinion in the hopes that maybe that policy will change at least towards the direction that I would prefer.

To use an analogy, I absolutely loathe when a cars salesman tries to pretend they are my chum. Just give me the damn specs, that is the only thing that matters in regards to my purchase.

I see good ideas with some bad execution. This however can simply be because the blog is badly written, due to not revealing enough information. (Which in fact it was considering the bracers and mage armor thing revealed in the thread later.)

DEX or STR: This is more of a thing in the system in general than spesific to monk. But it really seems STR is completely useless stat this time around, due to how damage really comes from adtional dice. Well outside of low levels, but those seem to be even worse waste of time than in PF1. I personally hope that the styles will help the case, especially since I would presume bulk at least partially is effected by STR but monk does not wear armor and possibly doesn't wield a weapon so they have lot less use for it.

Yeah monks should definetly get simple weapon profiency, by all means martial weapons and getting to use unarmed stuff with said weapons can be behind a feat. But it just does not make any sense thematicly and any ranged options being locked behind a feat isn't excatly appealing, and given that eventually everyone needs a ranged option then if you want to play unarmed you had to pick up a class feat as a tax.

Verbal component on Ki powers? Yeah no bad idea, sure if it is some sonic effect or something go ahead. But to my asthetics it is worse than the stereotypical lute playing bard being taken seriously by anyone.

As many have said Ki strike really needs to not be the only one to open up Ki powers.

This mostly a personal peeve, but I really hate how the blogs are written style wise. I do not care for the conversational tone. Just give the information in a solid easy to see format.

Wultram wrote:

I would say if not a single person even in that small sample size had any care about totems as the argument made in the blog post, it is a pretty good indication that the premise is wrong.

If really no one in your playing circle care about totems RP side speaks lots about how the people with which you play see Roleplaying, way less about what the average player like to do.

Coupled with your comment on the iconic character, it is very clear that what matter for you is getting the best value for the buck when buing your character feats and abilities. Not wrong, but hardly the only way to play.

First I am not going to adress the iconic, as I have stated previously that discussion would venture too far off the topic. I am not unwilling to discuss it, just not here.

As to the main gist of it. Or perhaps we do not care a whole lot about the standard fluff. The people I play with see classes as bags of mechanics, that are to be used to create a character. For example a superstisous barbarian could be the result of some mages experiment. Beast totem could have some lycantrophes in their ancestory(just not to the extenct they would be a full one.) Rage is just a word, it could just as easily be a samurai(the romantisized one not the historic) that has a zen like battle trance. But we do certainly look at best bang for buck in relation to the character. If a character concept for example includes being good with X weapon, well then you look through the classes on who gets profiency in it, or if you can spare a feat to gain it, and how it meshes up with other parts of the concept. If other part of the concept is being sneaky, and one that does not cast spells, then you could look at (u)rogues/ninja and a slayer, well it seems slayer is the best one of the bunch when it comes to weapon use and sneaky so that choice makes sense.

In short we roleplay plenty and our characters are actually characters not just some tacked on fluff from the rulebook. Customized fluff assuming equal level of creativity will always be superior to generic one. The former just has to fit one single character after all. And as such I would say the people that are using the standard fluff while not wrong in doing so are the ones much less invested in the roleplaying part of the game.

Still won't take 4 days for a good smith to make a sword.(if that is all they are working on) And 5lbs sword blade is pretty substantial sized one for the record. That being said 4 days is close enough to reality in my opinion. However...what about say full plate, nobody(alone) will make that in 4 days.(even with 1 person per piece it would be really stretching it) But then there are something like spears and axes which take vastly less time. And that is without going outside of combat gear.

I am pretty ok with everything else than the crafting time. There really should be say 4 tiers of time consuming in items that determine the base time required.

Okay so universalist is so much better than specialist, that you have to be an idiot to choose specilization. At least based on the preview, unless they get access to some beyond amazing class abilities. And no the 1 extra slot at highest level is no where close making them equal.

Again spell slots are cut in half. So casters in PF2 are intended to be cantrip spammers and nothing more? At least warlock was fairly interesting with it's limitless magic.

And please please, get someone to look at the math of blasting. Because at the moment, it is worse than ever. Ok so everyone has WAY more HP, the damage is significantly less, weakness is much lesser effect than before, at best you can stack 2 metamagics(based on information so far) most likely for actual blasting spells it is 1 and just as a cherry on top your spell slots have been cut in half.

Unspecified as many have mentioned. However this reminded me of a thing I used in my old homebrew setting, that was nicked from a different RPG that I do not remember anymore.(this was probably 20ish years ago)

Now the examples are totally made up words. So the verbal components of a spell are universal, however different traditions do it differently.

Let's say 2 different mages are casting fireball.

The actual verbal component is KA-GI-SA, with a spesific timing between them.

1) KAmenu deGIno misSA
2)yemKA riusGI jasSA

Which could translate to say "Become ash" or "Burn motherf..." :P

So the idea is that they are saying some sort of incarnation that includes the actual verbal component. Reasons are mainly tradition, ease of learning and obfuscation. However because the verbal component is always the same, that is what allows one to use spellcraft(among other things). Also gives somewhat nifty explanation for quickened spells that still have verbal components.

That argument fails to take into consideration that alignment wasn't invented in golarion. And I could care less what goes in that useless setting. If you start looking at DnD settings there is plenty grey instead of black and white. And lot more nuance than one would expect from a kids show.

Like I said if someone wants to play more simpleminded setting go ahead. The issues is forcing everyone else to steep down to the level of children. Not to mention that rules for morality are completely unnecessary to create a black and white setting.

If someone things that a kids show is a valid moral point of view to have, I don't think their opinion on morality can be taken seriously. Sure if you want to play saturday morning cartoons that is perfectly fine. But to suggest that it isn't simplified POV that doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny is just flat out delusional.

You know I really hate living in a timezone that makes these things have rougly billion posts before I get to it. So I am just going to go ahead and only focus on the actual blog. I am just going to focus on the parts that I think I have something worthy to comment.

Favored weapon: I am really not fond of the idea. It works fine for some deities but for some it is more of a symbol than an actual weapon. That being said I can easily live with it.

Domains: Not sure I like it only being 1 to start off with, that being said if you can spend some resource AT 1st LEVEL to gain a second one it should be fine. Powers being bit lesser than your best spells sounds like a good place for them to be power wise. Now I did not see any mention of domain spells or domain spell slots, but more on that later.

Spell pool: Unified pool is a good idea, it worked with Monk and Ninja. However that name needs to go. It is unintuitive and confusing. Silly sounding doesn't help, but such asthethics are marginal concern.

Anethma: While the idea is good as divine servants should really only concern themselves with their gods dogma, not morality, unless said deity puts focus on it. However I see one flaw in it, such servarnts should be just as much and even more so defined what they do rather than what they don't.

Channel energy: Deity deciding the positive/negative aspect is certainly the right decision. However I see some issues. First harm has never been and never will be of equal value to heal as long as the numbers stay the same. On a slight relation to that, the numbers we saw earlier seem to fail to take into account of the vastly inflated HP. I am also not a fan that this is a choice made for you. Sure some priests it fits. But it should not be assumed that every cleric has it. Getting rid of it would certainly help in getting rid of the healbot stigma.

Divine spell casting: First I do not like that the profiency is at set points, instead of you being to able focus on it if you so desire. Maybe you don't cast lot of offensive spells so save DC is immaterial to you, or perhaps you are going for a pure caster so want those ASAP. The number of spells slots....yeah that is going to have to change especially at 1st level. However there is a very big but in that, if you still gain an extra slot for domain spells, then I would say it is fine.

Overall: I have some major doubts, but it is mostly due to lack of details. And to be frank Paizo has not been consistent enough in their quality of publications for me to give them benefit of a doubt. The blog post itself was good, I was not a fan of the writing style itself, but the content was decent, this is really the level of meat these previews should have as a minium. I am certainly happy to see that they have been getting better at this aspect.

This honestly feels like a slap in the face. Oh yeah you guys who essentially made our company, that decided you didn't want to go with 4e's simplification. Nah we aren't interested in you, instead we are going to dumb down the game for toddlers.

And really, levels 1-3 are already waste of time as far as I am concerned. So what now I have to start beginning campaigns at level 10 or something?

You shouldn't pay a feat tax to not fail a DC 5 check when your result was 101.

Yeah WIS makes a lot more sense for halflings, they aren't in any shape really especially charismatic race. Mental fortitude on the other hand is a lot more prelevant.

Gnomes should totally have INT, you try out a lot of different things and you will learn how things works and can use that to predict how things you haven't tried will go. That same habbit also makes you extremely frustrating and annoying so if anything they should have cha penalty.

Well Golarion goblins should have -6(at minium) to all mental stats to match the lore. But that race should have never been called goblins cause they got nothing in common outside of green skin. But if you are hellbent on having them and be viable and can't kill the sacred cow of one mental and one physical, charisma is the least out of place.

Small weapons doing the same damage as mediums is a crappy rule. I am sorry but your todler sized warriors SHOULD suck in comparison. Now if small sized characters can use medium sized weapons that is ok, as long as they are limited to the upper limit of something longsword(the dnd longsword not the actual weapon.) sized, unless they spend the equivalent resources it would take medium to use large sized weaponry.

I agree that the one mental one physical bonuses is a thing that just needs to die.

And count me among the people that think we need a lot of 1st level ancestory feats (like minium of 3) or the races just look like skins instead of anything else.

And it seems that gnomes will continue to be axed in all the games that I run. Ok paizo listen in, cooky/zany characters aren't fun, they are annoying. That is why your goblins suck.

Finally, I really hate how this blog post was written. The tone was annoying and it barely contained information. I could have written all the relevant information with a quarter of the space.

I would certainly prefer if orcs got in. But not because I dislike half-orcs. Rape doesn't bother me(IN FICTION) as long as it is not on screen. Yes it is horrible thing, but so is torture and murder. Some may prefer a game that shies away from uncomftarable aspects, but I personally like the fact that there are nasty horrible beings in the world.

Now the reason that I would like orcs in the core. First I like to play in eberron and homebrews. The main reason however is that we would technically get rid of half elves and orcs as their own distinct races and instead just create an ancestry for half-bloods. And then you can mix and match whatever you want. Individual settings and tables can put whatever limitations on combinations that they want, but it would in my opinion be a much more valuable tool to have than the existing half-bloods. This of coarse goes with the assumption that the rules created for combining two races would be good.

No on all of it. However not necessarily for the expected reasons.

Goblins? I don't want them in the core because I don't like golarion goblins and I would personally like them either choosing another race or making the other ones deeper, with the additional space.

Chaotic Good? Nope if I have to do anymore work at beginning of a game than say. "We are not using alingment" I will not simply not buy their game, I will make sure to do my utmost nobody that asks for my suggestions will spend send any money it's way either.

Paladins? It is a loaded term and as such the class should have a more generic name. Paladin would remain as a in world term.

Another issue came to mind. Not sure if someone brought it up since the post count of this thread is groving faster than I can read up as I write this.

Onto the point anyway.

There is another reason I don't want goblins in the core. And that is that I hate golarion goblins. I also hate gnomes, kender too. I have no use nor desire to have that sort of stuff in my rpgs. If people wanna play slapstick humour rpgs no skin of my back. But the less I see of it the happier I will be. No your character is not funny no they are nor quirky or adorable. They are annoying. If I see any of said races in a game I would be part of I am likely to simply walk away.(assuming the setting didn't change them to something of worth.)

And yes this is totally selfish reason for not wanting them in the core. I see it as encouraging a playstyle that I loathe to be part of. And the less it is encouraged the more likely I am to see the type of gaming I enjoy.

Now this is also somewhat off topic, but to give a suggestion on how to handle crosbows it needs to have the other ranged options to compare to.

Thrown weapons: The major advantage of these should be that they are also melee weapons. I would not mind seeing a feat or even as standard an option to target a shield. And if succeeded the shield bonuses are halved. With the caveat that it needs to be of certain size.(so no shuriken or daggers.)

Current sling: This can stay pretty much as is. Just rename it as short or sheppards sling. Just add the option either in the weapon description or with alchemical items that those can be thrown with it.

War sling: Now these things were serious business and they should reflect that. Inspired by reality I would have their mechanical niche be that they can increase their damage by taking a hit to their range. Naturally this is determined by their ammunition not the weapon itself. Using size increases for the damage is probably the most elegant solution(and limit it to maxium of 2 size increases). The base damage also should be higher than the normal sling.

Both bows: Take composite out of the picture, any and all bows are just purchased with a set STR rating.

Short bow: The main advantage of this bow should be the option to use it on horseback or confined spaces. Maybe have it take lesser penalties on iterative attacks that has been mentioned in regards to some weapons.

Longbow: The advantage over the former is higher damage and range.

And finally to topic of the thread the crossbows.

First repeating crossbow just doesn't exist anymore. It was final hail mary attempt for personal protection in a throneroom not a proper weapon.

Hand crossbow: This should mainly be useful for it's concealability. 1d6 damage and can be reloaded as a free action. Also one handed weapon but needs 2 for loading.

Light crossbow: 1d10 damage. Takes one action to reload. If you make a second attack in the same turn the penalty for that attack is lesser than normal.

Heavy crossbow: 2d6 damage. 2 actions to reload.

All Xbows: The can have STR rating same as bows. However you can use higher STR than the user has, but this increases the loading time.

Okay so, first we are going to waste pace in the corebook for a gimmicky race, that a sizable fraction of the consumers base does not want there.

My personal problems are that:

1) This space could have been used for a race deserving the spot or deepening the existing ones.
2) I don't play in golarion, in my opinion it is the worst professionally published setting in DnD history. Now that is normally no skin off my back. But this seems to indicate that goblin mechanics will be tied deeply to golarion. Which essentially means that it will be really hard for me to use ANY goblins PC or no.
3) The attitude of the developpers. "We know better than you" is not the correct attitude to have. Especially when it has time and time again been shown that you infact don't.
4) Motive, this is clearly a marketing move nothing more. So now marketing is more important than actually creating a good game. That is again not a good attitude to have.

Honestly PFS should really get 0% consideration when it comes to game design in my opinion. It is a limited form of playing tabletop that comes with a massive amount of baggage. And even as large as PFS is as a group they are still the minority, vast amounts of games at least by my perception. (and others I have talked to) Are traditional games, second are the adventure/module runners and only after that comes the PFS crew.

Taking PFS into consideration results in clusterf+@~s like the crane wing nerf with a orbital strike.

Now I have sympathy that there are issues that people have there, but sadly the concerns are not for the standard way to play the game. The same way a competive videogame should not be designed with professional tournament players in mind at least at the expense of rest of the player base.

As to the more broad subject of the thread. Level dipping in itself is not an issue at all. Classes are a collection of mechanics nothing more nothing less. The difference in power between multiclass and single class character is negligeble compared to the difference within the same class with different levels of optimization.

That being said there is room for improvement. Single class should be just as strong as a whole, but that comes with the caveat that you wanted everything that single class was offering for you. Multiclass would essentially allow you to trade it for something you like, that in a vacuum would be equally valuable. Of coarse that is the ideal, in practice it is impossible. But essentially multiclassing should allow you to combine abilities in an interesting fashion should you not like the package you get from staying single class. And for narrative reasons.(For example someone who used to be X but then turned to a completely different direction.)

Alright first. This is the first blog post that had any merit to posting it. Actually some meat and not just some vagueness that means about as much as a politicians promise. And to top it off it was well layed out.

Now as to the concerns. Mixing in nat 1/20 rolls into this in my mind is a mistake. It is simply a sacred cow that needs to die anyway, but mixing it with a parallel system just makes it even worse. And yes we should not need to pay a feat tax to not fail every 20 times we do something no matter how easy it is related to our skill level. At least this issue is fairly easy to houserule away. Then again what does it say about the quality of the product when I can see from a preview not even playtest something that I imidietly see as houserule it away.

My other concerns are related to d20 just ruling the game same as levels 1-4 or so in PF1(Which in my opinion are waste of space in the book outside of NPC use), now just stretched over 20 levels. However without having an actual document to build characters and check DCs etc. I can't really say if there is an issue or not.

That has a lot to do with the difference in center grip shields. They are used lot more activly than strapped ones. Center grip shield relies heavily on parries, but because it is usually held at an arms lenght it can't be heavy. That is why they are fairly easy to break. Some have suggested that lack of metal rims was also used to catch peoples weapons(not intentionally, more a feature nice if it happens.)

First a note, I am not gonna argue semantics here if trap is the correct term to use or not, so just please accept the use intended and not some malovant twisted version.

Now this isn't that much related to the above post but it did remind me of something.

I would say cleave is sort of a trap feat. To bring this is up is that it is different type of trap feat. Mainly that it is good(actually exceptionally good) when you can get it but becomes practically worthless later. The reason being full attacks.

Even if we were talking about damage, with dedicated blasters builds you can easily rival the martials, and you can ignore their defenses a lot better than a martial can. To top it off even dedicated blasters usually focus on a single spell or at most a couple so they have all the basic goodies of full casters. For example some napkin math with battering blast build should be proof enough.

Personally I hope they either remove or fix the biggest problem spells. For example simulacrum is a good concept for a spell but it really needs to be rewritten. And at the same time make martials play in the same league as casters.

Just claiming that CMD does not exist is at worst bold faced lie and at best massive ignorance of the game system.

Not liking this. However there is a very big butt in this. The basic idea is fine. We would just need to fiddle around with the numbers, and when the playtest rolls around that is at least in theory what those things are for.

Now naturally we are all working on limited information but this is how I would personally change it.

Double the bonuses from expert to legendary, untrained becomes 0, the latter is mainly just making it feel simpler book keeping wise. This will make difference between ranks bit more pronounced and even with simpler tasks higher skill character being able to smash people even if they are higher level than them.

Now this is the major difference, change untrained to 1/2 level. So you will still stay in the same ballpark so it is not autofail to even attempt a task, but there is a clear difference in a character who spent rerources on a skill and one that didn't invest any. This also allows for professional NPCs without inflating their levels.

One adtional thing I would add in is some general drawback quality in character creation that would give a hefty penalty like half a skill bonus from level again to a skill. So if you want to create a character or NPC for that matter that would be especially ungifted/learned in some capacity you can have the crunch match the fluff. Maybe even another option that the penalty applies outside of spesific circumstances. Like say for a Merfolk character it could be that for survival gets the penalty outside of aquatic regions.

Another thing I am really concerned about is, recreating the problem of "I wanna do X." "Do you have feat Z?" So I hope the devs are very careful in what they limit to only be achievable with higher skill tiers and feats.

OP is correct, BA isn't bad, it is much much worse than that. It is nothing but an excuse to be lazy in your design. This also goes for lazy GMing. You don't need them if you have rudimentary understanding of math and have something that can be classified as actual work ethic. It's just a crutch.

BA is at the level of bad game mechanics, that not simply I refuse to play any game that has it. I make sure to tell other people to not play that game when my input is asked. There aren't that many single mechanics that have managed that status from me.

While I do have my gripes about some of the incorrect use of terms. It isn't that big of a deal to me personally, because I know that DnD falchion does not mean the RL world falchion. Might confuse new players, if they have existing knowledge.

What I would do instead is make the weapons like:
one and a half hand straight sword, mechanical information and in the description there are some examples of such weapons.

This way we could cut down a lot of the bloated weapons list and with little effort the devs could learn what advantages different weapon types give. I would really like if your choice of weapon mattered in a significant quantity. Nothing too complex of a system, but the RL knowledge would be used to inspire game mechanics. Like say a flail could negate a shield. Dagger could have increased critical multiplier in CDG.

Okay I mulled this over. I say it is still absolute garbage of an idea, and someone needs to be sent to the corner for it.

However I did think of a single decent thing that could be made out of it. Body slots are gone, and resonance is used instead. Number of points should probably increase at the lower level. However that is simply a matter of equipping it and nothing more. You still have all the charges of the item. And no consumable items are wearable items. This would solve the issue that some classes don't really have a decent choice for slot X items. The other is that for example outside of niche builds all characters need cloak of resistance as the levels increase unless the GM is softballing pretty damn hard. So as a result, all the cool cloak items never got used because of the massive opportunity cost. This is of coarse made with the assumption that amount of magic items should be limited to some degree. However with all that said, it would be a lot simpler to say "all creatures can have X permanent magical items in use at the same time." Simpler and doesn't create this weird lore implication that is at best silly.

Just from characters? Honestly the best thing that could happen that AL isn't presented even as an optional rule. Why? Because morality mechanics are cancer. A tumour on the hobby that as an idea has caused more harm than any single other mechanic in any RPG ever.

But since that has about snowballs chance in hell, if you are gonna make a mechanic, that means it is a rule. And rules are hard, none of this wishy washy vagueness. Either write is a rule especially given that this is objective morality or don't pretend you are actually creating a ruleset.

To be fair, even the original code needs to be rewritten. It has the excat same issue as alingment does. We have objective rules, but we are never told what those rules actually are. And that is before we talk about how massive of ego someone needs to claim that they are the perfect judge of what is right and wrong. But regarding the code it needs any and all vague aspects of it destroyed.

First evil actions, okay what actions are evil. I will need 100% complete list of all evil actions or more reasonably hard rules on how something is defined as evil. While we are at it you need to define good and lawful perfectly too, might as well do the whole alignment while you are at it.

Second we have honor, alright what honor code are we using? Do I need to challenge someone to mortal combat if they insult my honor? Am I required to actually treat people of lower status with honor or only my peers? Anyway the point is clear, you can't just say honor and expect it to be universal truth.

Third, legitimate is never defined. Does the ruler(s) need to be democratically empowered by the people. Is a monarch legitimate? What if they just inherited the position? Are all conquers illegitimate or not?

So all in all the code doesn't REALLY tell us anything conrete about how a paladin should behave. So we are placing the burden to the GM, who now just needs to solve the debate of morality that has been going for eons AND it needs to be objective morality solution to boot.