cfalcon's page

Cancel my subscription to "Pathfinder Rulebook" (should be my only subscription- if there are others, cancel them as well).

Thanks,

^cfalcon

First, the whole Impale feature can only be performed as a standard action, which means it won't do as much damage as a full attack at higher levels

I mean, there's mechanics to add it to a charge, and a full attack often isn't feasible. It's not like you are always trading it for a full attack. And you can try every round.

Pinning the enemy in place also restricts your weapon - you're no longer threatening other spaces around you

Where is this restriction? I see one about not using the weapon to attack other creatures, but that's very different from no longer threatening. Also, it's not clear what happens if you just release the weapon- there's rules for dealing with a weapon that is impaling a creature that no one is holding, but there's other rules saying that the impalement can be ended if you are disarmed.

and the foe you've impaled can disarm you. (This is a viable strategy in Spheres of Might - the Duelist sphere focuses on disarming and is quite handy.)

Presumably you can find someone besides a guy stacked high in Duelist talents for your impale then. Certainly dropping this into a regular game would prove disruptive. Then you also have the rules quandary listed above.

I don't think "easy stunlock" is quite the right way to describe how the ability works in a game unless foes are very dumb and only ever attempt checks to get free

Certainly a typical group of PCs will have someone, and possibly many someones, against whom this is an easy stunlock- and the same is true of most encounters.

Oh, and Hold Person is a thing.

Hold Person is well understood by the REST of the game rules. In addition to the obvious type restriction, it is understood that increasing your will save is good against this entire class of ability, and plenty of things allies can do interact with this, such as effects that help will saving throws, effects that help paralyze, etc. Your allies can also dispel your Held state with a variety of spells and abilities. It's vastly more interactive than this, which requires houserules just to interact with the spell set at all, and doesn't have any built in hooks to be countered by the large variety of magical items, spells, racial abilities, and class abilities that already exist to prevent a character from being pinned down in this matter.

And again, hit points are abstract: being impaled is not abstract.

the books would be a lot thicker if every ability tried to cite every other effect that might work against it. XD

That's the level of effort you have to go through when you add something like this though.

Did you ever deal with 2nd edition psionics? It used the standard magic stuff as sort of a baseline, but it made two core mistakes which resulted in it being wildly overpowered. The first was, it used checks against your OWN abilities instead of checks against ENEMY abilities. This worked from a lore perspective, but it really meant that you were rolling against your own high constitution (or whatever), with small chance of failure, no matter whether you were going to mess with the mind of a dog or a dragon. The second core problem psionics had was that it was a parallel construction of magic. You'd have a "disintegrate" power that worked pretty much like the spell, complete with saving throw, but anything that worked to defend against magic didn't work against it. Meaning that, for instance, high levels of magic resistance offered no protection.

The error in this book isn't nearly as egregious, but it still uses a very fluid stat that is balanced around damage dealing (Armor Class) as a key for a control method. In Pathfinder, control methods use the CMB/CMD mechanics (aka, Impale not using CMD is a design flaw), and that's also where you go to find your defensive boosts against these things. By having rolls that have no meaningful chance of failure (attack rolls), forcing rolls that have no meaningful chance of success (concentration versus 1.5x level plus stat, forcing attacks against your CMD with no bonuses, even to an expert grappler / tripper / repositioner / dragger), it plays by rules that aren't interactive with the rest of the game.

Also I want to point out: I've ONLY looked at the Lancer part. I went there first because I know that lances are generally not rewarding enough for a player that wants to use them, and I was thinking, hey, maybe they fixed this here, maybe I could find something I could drag right on in to my games. Maybe I landed on the most disruptive thing I could find strictly by chance: maybe not.

In the universe where you automatically fail reflex saves (but not critical fail), can you opt to auto-fail (but not critically fail) while awake too? You could easily be in a case where failing is fine, but a critical fail is not.

> So you could dual-wield with two short lances
> And despite the name, you don't need to use a lance for the Lancer sphere

A Lancer specialty should logically require a lance. Heck, I don't even see it limited to piercing weapons. The Impale ability seems to work on anything that deals lethal damage, even an unarmed strike? Hit points are abstract, a character who is impaled is not abstract. The impaled condition doesn't seem to interact well with any of the other defenses in the game- the only hit that I see required is a regular attack (that deals normal damage) against AC.

If I sent some guy with this against a PC, they'd be furious. Can't cast (the check is against a vastly too high DC, adding a stat+level advancing value like CMB to a DC check baseline like 10, along with a second "by-level" advancement, spell level), can't move, action to get loose is not a check at the beginning of a round like most CC but is instead a standard action, and of course, the "lancer" with the short swords or whatever (or the spleen-gripping monk?) will merely reapply this condition without much effort. Getting out via escape artist, freedom of movement, or anything else a standard character might have around doesn't seem to be defined, because this is a parallel construction of grapple. Instead the wasted turn just to get free from the melee attack is a CMB check, requiring the character to mysteriously have maxxed his CMB for the purpose of getting out of this thing.

> Going by the comments, most people enjoy the flexibility in how characters can be made.

Right, which is my point. There's no way this is not hot garbage for anyone I've ever played with. I can't trust reviews from whomever likes this stuff, which is many people. There's no "roughly similar power level to stock seal of approval", there's no "I guarantee this doesn't offer solid stunlocks complete with a sword on your liver on round one" certification. Tastes are different enough that for 3pp content I have to study it to find out if it is made with a design philosophy that works at all and is compatible with other material, and that's a great deal of effort. If someone makes content like "here's a bunch of creative feats that work alongside stock Pathfinder", I'd be interested, but I honestly doubt someone running Spheres would find that spicy enough for them.

Gaekub, the "willing" text is in the rules, and not replicated per spell. Your fix would work to keep the current logic. I don't really care how they phrase it if they want to keep the current logic- opposition to word choice strikes me as hysteria, but it's not an issue I care about. I don't feel the current word choice is unfortunate or "problematic" or whatever, it's fine. But if that gets changed, I don't care.

My concern is changing it to "the PC decides", because that's a serious change with more downsides than upsides.

If the goal is to prevent the bad guy from teleporting you without first shoving your body into an extradimensional kidnapping sack, then have rules to that effect. Spell out specifically what happens when. If the player has to actively say "willing for this, not for that", then you end up with goofy situations like "communicating with an unconscious person via prearranged code" and "intimidating unconscious person with scary spell names" and other nonsense.

I don't think the rules should change at all.

It doesn't make any sense for an unconscious character to be willing to be teleported by his friends, but unwilling to be teleported by his enemies. He's unconscious, and can't make a conscious decision.

If you really want this in the rules, then the devs need to provide some in-universe reason that defines actions in sensible ways. It will be quite a bit of rules, but it can get what the devs seem to talk about wanting without special casing PCs, or otherwise allowing for an unconscious person to somehow not be unwilling in some cases, but not others.

Kaladin_Stormblessed wrote:

Removing (mechanically relevant or otherwise) alignment is easier than adding mechanically relevant alignment.

Is it? Seems equally viable either way.

No, it's not.

The current game has alignment. That means it has alignment mentions for pretty much every creature, and some weapon affixes mention alignment, and some class features mention alignment. It's in a bunch of places. Taking it out is a little bit challenging, because you have to make sure that some things don't get too strong (a Holy weapon that works on everyone you don't like too strong, but is it a big problem if the Paladin's smite loses that restriction?). But it's doable.

Now picture a game without the alignment baseline. You have to manually come up with content as you go. Which monsters are "always evil"? Which are "usually evil"? You don't have anything to go on. This is much harder than the other way, where you simply ignore the pieces about alignment you don't like for free as you go. This hypothetical version doesn't have a Holy weapon affix. What if you want one? How hard should it hit for?

It's just huge amounts of content that you don't notice if you run a game without alignment, but that you'd basically never be able to replicate if you tried to inject it on top of a game that lacks alignment completely.

In my current table top game, I have a player that wanted to play a druid that changes into plants for his wild shape. However, in this game we've agreed to only use core books for the time being. I love the flavor of a plant-based druid, and didn't want to stifle character choice. So we decided that he will use the statistics for those qualifying beasts for his wild shape, but we'll flavor it as him changing into various plants. Everyone is happy.

The problem is when the flavor doesn't match the rules. If someone has something that is good against beasts, or is good against plants, your druid friend will have rules that don't match the character he is playing. Such a character will never have some kind of Ivysaur-style vine whip, etc.

It can work just fine, and I'm glad you guys like it, but I would want the mechanics to model the reality. Not everyone really cares about that though.

Part of the problem with 3rd party stuff is the lack of oversight and market penetration. I heard all sorts of cool stuff about Spheres of Might. When I checked it out, I looked at the thing about being a lance master, and the core mechanic of that is impaling someone with a lance. This seems to require an attack roll with a -2, and then they are in a state that shared some commonalities with a grapple, and escaping it requires a CMB versus CMD roll. I would not want a character to be physically impaled with a mere attack roll, nor do I find it very reasonable to have to wiggle out with a special combat maneuver check that inevitably won't inherit much support from the remainder of the rules (ex: unlike a grapple, freedom of movement is ignored; if such a rule was core, freedom of movement would likely have some mention of it, etc.).

We are sorta at the point where we need some stodgy council of DMs that applied some brutal and unpopular stamps to 3pp. From looking around, most people who run Spheres of Power love it: I can only assume that their game experiences overall are materially different than mine (or perhaps I totally misunderstood something about the thing I read). I want a Simulationist Seal Of Quality, or something, and other people want something totally different as a sign of a good game, and it's a damned tragedy that we can't easily differentiate by intended markets without studying something for hours.

I have a friend who runs about half the campaigns our group does, with me as the other half. He completely ignores 3pp, for a similar reason that you mentioned. It only takes being burned a couple times by a poorly tested idea, or one that extends the philosophy in a direction inappropriate for a campaign world, before you just start assuming that all 3pp is not worth the time to vet.

As someone else put it, could you eliminate Spell Resistance?

Now this one is more interesting. Spell resistance is interesting because it reflects a type of inherent immunity to spells, and has always had a somewhat complex interaction with spell items, requiring you to intuit why evoking fire is prone to spell resistance, but magically summoning a lesser amount of non-magical fire is not prone to spell resistance. This assigns a type of verisimilitude to the mechanic, but is it necessary?

The flip side of this is the mechanical detail. The spell resistance step, usually skipped, is, these days, the mechanical mirror of something similar to a miss chance from concealment on a physical attack. It's an extra throw you have to make before you get to do whatever roll or throw comes next (attack roll or saving throw).

The advantage of this is that it allows you to set up another kind of supernatural protection for creatures and players in your game world. It's not quite as interesting in 3.X+ as it was in AD&D, where it was a flat chance that didn't scale, and as such assigning a 10% value was exciting, and an 80% value was extremely high stakes, but it is more realistic when it comes to obeying the logic of "high level is better at stuff".

Basically, I think whether to keep spell resistance comes down to this: is this version actively attempting to eliminate such rolls? For instance, 5ed, which has done away with spell resistance, also did away with the miss chance as a core mechanic. Everything there was replaced with advantage/disadvantage. I'm not a fan of this simplification at all: others are. 5ed is certainly selling product, right? This simplification is a cause of grousing, but it hasn't hurt their uptake much.

Anyway, I'd like it if Pathfinder continued to model different steps in this, keeping spell resistance, concealment miss percent, and similar "but does this even make sense" type of rolls. I want spell resistance to stay, especially if the only thing gained is the removal of one rare roll that models a supernatural magical avoidance pretty darned well.

But if the entire game is moving to something simplified like 5ed, then it makes sense to remove it.

If you look through the comments when this discussion arose, you will find multiple people talking about how this is a problem. You haven't noticed it or you have people who eventually overcome it and you "don't see it as a problem."

How many just quit?

Over the term "level"?

I'd assume some number around or equal to zero.

How many felt the game was too complex

For this vague of a question? Probably some. But there's always been a plethora of "simple" games that don't maintain any tradition, and they never seem to have everyone swarm to them. But even 5ed, which is reasonably simplified and assuredly has a much reduced scope to anything in the 3.X / d20 line, and is unusually successful as far as tabletop RPGs go, doesn't throw out tradition unless it is getting something for its effort.

but simple addition is problematic for them.

These people are always going to have issues playing a tabletop RPG that is based on simple arithmetic, if simple arithmetic is not at least a little bit fun for them. Certainly you can use tools to do all this work, but it's going to be an uphill battle- one you may be successfully waging with roll20 and some other scripts with your group, but it's simply a feature of the genre- and it isn't a bug to most players.

Spell Circles/Tiers/Whatever works better than level because you separate it from a multitude of other levels.

I disagree pretty strongly. Spell level is a time tested word, and while it gets people making jokes about the overuse of the word "level" (which has been abandoned most places besides class and spell), there's no evidence that it really raises any barriers or causes any long term confusion. The existence of the class chart for casters which shows spell levels and class levels should put it to rest for most players, and the remaining folks were probably always going to get confused, asking why their 7th level wizard can't cast 7th circle spells.

PF2 derives from PF1 derives from 3.5 D&D, which goes down the chain, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, AD&D, D&D.
D&D 5ed derives from 4ed which derives from 3.5, etc.

It would be vastly more confusing to change the terminology in just one of these ten things. If anyone is confused by this stuff, it is literally just momentarily.

Fuzzypaws wrote:

Guessing time. :3

• Alter reality: Illusion, quasi-wish. Create a permanent (or instantaneous if they really want it to be that potent) illusion replacing reality within its area of effect.
  

Hmmm.

AD&D 2nd Edition Tome of Magic wrote:

Alternate Reality* (Alteration)

Range: 0
Components: V, S, M
Duration: Instantaneous
Casting Time: 3
Area of Effect: Creature touched
Saving Throw: None
With this spell, the caster creates a small variation in probabilities. This variation lasts only a moment, but creates alternate results for one recent event. When the spell is cast, any one event attempted by the recipient during the previous round is recalculated, essentially allowing (or forcing) the creature to make new die rolls.
Only events that begin and end in a single round can be affected. Only one die roll can be rerolled. If the creature touched is a willing recipient, the player can choose which roll (the original or the new roll) affects him, more than likely picking the most successful. If the creature is unwilling, he must redo the action. The second result, whatever its outcome, cannot be changed.
Typical uses of this spell include allowing a fighter to reroll an attack, forcing an opponent to reroll a saving throw, or allowing a wizard to reroll the damage caused by a fireball.
The material component is a small, unmarked die.

Pardon the massive block quote, but it's been a few pages.

Fuzzypaws is remembering Alter Reality correctly. "Alternate Reality", as Zaister quoted, is a different spell.

The mistake? Consulting 2ed, which had illusionist as a specialist, next to many others that we still have today, like necromancer.

AD&D, the game in question, aka 1st edition, has Alter Reality, and it's an Illusionist spell. In that game, "Illusionist" is a class next to "Magic-User", and is largely limited to ONLY illusions (obviously there are some odd exceptions to this). 2nd Edition rolled the spell lists together and gave us something like the modern distinction we have today with wizard.

Here's the spell:

Alter Reality (Illusion/Phantasm, Conjuration/Summoning)

Level:7
Components: Special
Range: Unlimited
Casting Time: Special
Duration: Special
Saving Throw: Special
Area of Effect: Special

Explanation/Description: The alter reality spell is similar to the seventh level magic-user limited wish spell (q.v.). In order to effect the magic fully, the illusionist must depict the enactment of the alteration of reality through the casting of a phantasmal force, as well as verbalization in a limited form, before the spell goes into action.

Going to the illusionist's phantasmal force, a 1st level spell, in turn directs you to the magic-user's spell of the same name, a 3rd level spell. It's generally the spell that became minor image (spectral force, the 3rd level illusionist spell, became major image). The text for it includes visual illusion only, and excludes "audial illusion".

I don't know if alter reality required you to first cast phantasmal force on round N and then cast alter reality on round N+1, or if expending the 7th level spell slot simultaneously with the 1st level spell was the correct method of play.

IBut it always clashed with me that you had fun fantasy weapons like spiked chain sitting next to something as mouthful as bardiche, which I am not even sure how you properly pronounce it. Is it french?

I think you should either have one or the other. If it has an axe head on a long stick, it is halberd. If it is a sword head on a long stick, it is a glaive. Simplify it a bit.

It is odd. I greatly prefer the historical weapons, and the other stuff is simply strange and I normally tolerate it unless it is problematic. The spiked chain pre-pathfinder was problematic because it was literally always causing problems. It interacted with a bunch of rules oddly, and it wasn't clear why this goofy length of chain was constantly on my tables doing something annoying, so I banned it. Pathfinder fixed all that- it's still a bit of an oddity, but it is now selected by character who want this exotic weapon that does exotic things, not because it has like three odd synergies with low level spells, positioning, and large characters.

Anyway, I don't want the historical weapons simplified, I'd like a system with more design space such that you can print a page of polearms and have them be meaningfully different. The 3.X stuff has that intention, but the specials don't always fit.

I mean, we already get to decide whether we want to accept a raise or not in PF1 even though we're literally dead, so it doesn't seem like too much to decide whether our unconscious character is OK with a spell.

That's a very special case though, where your soul gets to know a stat sheet of the casting cleric, so you don't wake up in a torture chamber. I feel you shouldn't be extrapolating from this case, especially given that the rules for souls are different, unexplained, and definitely only defined when necessary.

At 1st level, your ability scores all start at 10. Your ancestry then gives you ability boosts, each of which increases the score by 2. Most ancestries get three ability boosts, two of which have to go into specific scores. The remaining free ability boost can go into any score except the two set ones. Most ancestries also get a flaw, which decreases a designated score by 2. You can put your free ability boost in the same score as your flaw if you want to get back to 10. In later parts of character creation, you'll get more ability boosts, which we'll cover in later blogs! (And if you want to roll your ability scores randomly, we have an option for that in the playtest so you can see how that might work, though we prefer for characters used in the playtest to be generated in the standard way.)

I have to say, this is a real turn-off for me. I don't think I like the sound of all the things being based on one baseline array, instead of rolling to represent how individuals are very different from each other, etc. This sounds like a departure from "roll or buy your unique self, then apply modifiers from race" into "here's a pile of +2 bonuses to put on a mono-ten chassis".

I'm missing stuff, of course, but the direction seems poor to me.

Xenocrat wrote:

Counterpoint: It doesn't. Only Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard really need to be in core.

Fighting man, priest and mage

It's "Fighting-Man", "Magic-User", and "Cleric". Cleric was the first non-hyphenated class!

This is definitely an interesting way to do this. This could be really good. IMO the best blog yet.

Mark mentioned once making a passable Magus as a Wizard with a sword (I think). I’d like to try a build once the play test comes out.

I doubt that some multiclass thing will magically turn up better designed than an actual class designed around this. Especially something as interesting and well put together as the Pathfinder Magus.

Being told "you can build it badly in core" is always junk anyway. Same issue with the ninja. If someone says "Help me build a rogue", your answer is to discuss what they want to do with that rogue, and point them in a helpful direction. If someone says "I want to play ninja", and the game is young enough (because none ship with a functional ninja), the next statement is "well, take rogue, then grab potentially suboptimal weapon "short sword" and call it a wakizashi, then grab suboptimal feats X and Y so you can do ninja stuff..."

When someone wants to play a character, the ideal case is that that character concept exists as a template. Assuming you can get there from multiclassing is often a bad assumption- unless the designers very carefully considered this potential and have a bunch of solid multiclass feats (or other plug-in abilities) that make this functional. Certainly, we've never seen this type of build function properly since at least AD&D, and possibly not even then. Meanwhile, alternate classes and prestige classes have a very high likelihood of giving the player exactly what they want.

Also, after following this hobby for so many years, I'm really sick of hearing about how some character concept that is always done correctly in a splatbook later can TOTALLY THIS TIME be done using stock core rules. It can't. It never ever ever can. The wakizashi isn't a short sword, the fighter/mage isn't a magus, the kitsune isn't a "refluffed" gnome, or whatever, none of those things are ever true.

Did anyone here have the Encyclopedia Magica for 2nd edition AD&D? The one where someone did a Find + Replace to swap every instance of "mage" for "wizard.

Dude, I literally came here to post this EXACT thing. I absolutely remember reading that, laughing my ass off, marking the page, and showing it to my group the next time.

I still sometimes tell someone to take X points of dawizard.

I even checked the post above meeeeeeee

I generally disagree with all of this. The inbuilt strength modifier is a bit hacky but a reasonable attempt at a model, but everything else models guns worse than we have already. One of the bigger problems is the "attacks per round" with the iterative penalty. For melee weapons, a combat round is fine- it's reasonably abstract, and the hit penalty represents how it is harder to land multiple attacks in a short time. Fundamentally a character with 4 attacks with a sword per round isn't doing anything differently than someone with 1 attack with a sword per round if they full attack a target: he merely has a chance to score more telling blows in the brief combat round. All ammunition based weapons suffer, however, as they tie shots to individual actions. A semiautomatic pistol does not take a high level character, or special training, to fire more than once every six seconds. That abstraction is built into the system, but other aspects act to compensate.

I don't think these gun rules are more accurate, or better in really any way at all.

Pathfinder and 5e are very different. I would hazard a guess that Pathfinder is the leader of rules-heavy high-fantasy roleplaying systems.

If PF2 is too fanatical about simplification, it will throw this marketshare away completely, in exchange for trying to fight the behemoth that is WotC for the scraps.

I really agree with this completely. There's a lot of 5ed inspired stuff they are testing, and I don't know why they would try to go for a heavily competed market space over one that they have a solid reputation with.

With a wounding weapon:

Round 1: You deal 30 damage total and they take 3 bleed.
Round 2: They take 3 bleed and deal 30 more damage (63 total) and they have Bleed 6
Round 3: They take 6 bleed, you deal 30 more damage (99 total) and they have 9 bleed
Round 4: They take 9 bleed, you deal 30 more damage (138 total) and they have 12 bleed, etc.

The bleeding weapon enchantment states that it deals bleed damage when it hits, and then it also states that it deals bleed damage at the beginning of a character's turn. My understanding would be that the first round would deal 30 damage and 3 points of bleed, and then at the start of their turn, they take 3 bleed. In other words, I believe it ties the +2 enhancement for damage at the beginning of the opponent's turn, based on the wording of it.

So I would have it as:

Round 1: You deal 30 damage plus 3 bleed damage (33 total).
Round 2: They take 3 bleed and you deal 30 damage plus 3 bleed damage (33 total this attack, 69 total) and they have Bleed 6.
Round 3: They take 6 bleed, you deal 30 more damage plus 3 bleed damage (33 total this attack, 108 total) and they have Bleed 9.
Round 4: They take 9 bleed, you deal 30 more damage plus 3 bleed damage (33 total this attack, 150 total) and they have bleed 12.

Is there some ruling or some example text that would show it going the other way? Or are we just reading it differently?

You take it to whichever war torn city is having issues with food. You charge some people with keeping its hit points low enough, and you provide Terrasque burgers. Forever. It's unconscious and can't feel, and think of all the suffering you are mitigating!

PCs: solving world hunger, one abomination at a time.

NINJA OR RIOT

Nonsense. Nature doesn't give a damn about alignment, including any concern for "neutrality".

Yes, correct, that's why nature is neutral. I really recommend some of the older material on this, where they kind of walk you through the reasoning for this model. It's super good. Or, uh, effective. It's super effective.

Nonsense. Five out of the nine alignments, all of which are based on human morality... are somehow alien to human morality?

Only the "good" ones are really defined on human morality, but they have broader truths for any society that isn't inconceivably alien to us. The "evil" ones vary between stuff you could argue as natural (extreme selfishness) and stuff that isn't (devotion to strictly evil ideals).

I will agree, at least, that if Druids are supposed to be Neutral, forcing them to be fully neutral makes perfect sense. Again, it's this arbitrary silliness that Druids can be Lawful or Good, but not both, that I object to.

So the history on this goofy situation is that we started with true neutral druids, but they wanted to open it up in 3.0. They could have allowed neutral good and neutral evil- arguably reflections of nature- but instead they also allowed lawful neutral and chaotic neutral- a bit harder to justify, and went with the "some aspect must be neutral". This means that the lawful neutral of the druid is less about the primacy of order and more about order in nature, but this distinction is only ever implied.

I don't think that the ability of lawful neutral or neutral good, but not lawful good, to be druids, is a good argument to eliminate the moral core of the nature-supremacy ethos and its attendant class- I'd much prefer they stepped partially or all the way backwards on this. When player choice clashes with kit, I think a system designer should choose kit, but choose it in such a way that a DM can easily see how that unplugs, and write the rules such that a later designer/DM can easily overwrite that part.

Your other arguments are based on ridiculous contrafactuals. I can't even figure out what this one's supposed to mean; it's just baffling.

By stamping something with an alignment- a behavior, a monster, a bloodline, a class- you give a massive tell to future storytellers and world builders about what this is supposed to be. Someone who goes against this intent does so knowing that they'll have to patch a few holes, and that's fine- the alternative was to offer essentially no direction at all. It's really good to do this where appropriate, such as druid, paladin, anti-paladin, etc.

Probably because you've never taken the thirty seconds it takes to realize that everything you're saying is absolute nonsense.

I honestly didn't realize this stuff was hard to follow. Basically, alignment restrictions are a way to signal to people what you want this used for, what fantasy and kit are the default language that people should understand. When you remove the restriction, you make it vague and cloudy, and you remove the ability for the player to read the class and have an image. This doesn't mean it has to be that way in all possible content, but you want to set the more restrictive baseline, with the relatively straightforward and somewhat human-centric alignment, as a tool.

In that case, why don't we solve the alignment problem and the multiclassing problem in one fell swoop by adding a third alignment axis-- morality cubes!-- and then assign each and every single class one combination of Law/Chaos, Good/Evil, and Bacon/Necktie they're allowed to follow.

Bacon Chaotic Neutral is the new Kender!

Honestly, you could easily sell me on this idea if you had something else that worked perpendicular to the two existing axes. The existing setup is so excellent because it maps reality closely enough to be understandable, and serves as a good creative focus. There are settings that throw it away, usually to their detriment- but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done better.

Establishing form in the void is the big goal of all of this. It makes for a common language, and of course it isn't going to be accurate under every filter.

That logic baffles me. This is fiction: someone who can't handle that is going to have a really terrible time, no matter their personal history. Gutting out what might be acceptable for stories is a terrible direction, and definitely one I would never want to see a system we're supposed to use as a baseline take.

It's a frightening direction. It would make all the fiction really tame and lame because it might offend someone. We'd have to tread carefully around all manner of tragedy, in a genre that is based on war, murder, extortion, rape, slavery, and many other terrible things. You'd limit the stories. It's bad news.

"It also does imply an aspect of rapeyness that is well out of date"

It's not out of date. Orcs are an evil race. Rape is evil. Orcs are fecund and love rape. That's clearly one of many evils that they are all about. There's nothing "out of date" about having an evil race do evil things. Orcs should make you uncomfortable, they are vile.

Why do Druids need to be "something neutral"?

Because nature is inherently neutral. Requiring druids to be partially neutral (or even true neutral, which was way better IMO) forces them into a partially alien role. They are simultaneously more enlightened in some ways than the civilizations around them and also more savage and unenlightened. They are different. The alignment provides a way to stamp that into the game in a way that everyone understands.

It's time to stop pretending it makes sense

Why does it make sense to me and everyone I've played the game with, literally ever?

I'll reiterate my point though: a DM who wants to throw these restrictions out has little stopping him in the case of the paladin (he has to work out the ramifications of the alignment-based moves), and nothing stopping him in the case of the druid, monk, etc. Meanwhile, a DM trying to add them into a game has quite a bit of work to do, especially if the monsters and spells don't come tagged with alignments.

I think players should be the arbiters of PC alignment and the DM should just slap an insanity tag on the PC, if necessary, but leave PC alignment alone

I just disagree. I think this is an important DM tool. It isn't irreplaceable, but it's important.

I don't think so, it seems to gain something real in exchange for something trivial to get around. It might be fair to offer this to your players if you make it clear that Diplomacy checks are enforced and important (and can't just be gotten around with a party face handling everything or with good roleplay). In my games at least (and I suspect many games) this would be too good.

Generally a pure social penalty is not going to add up to actual power unless the social penalty is strong enough to be disruptive. And as always with custom races, the entire race needs to be considered. The RP thing is a very loose guide, mostly to give a hint of what magnitude of penalty and bonus a given vision should entail, roughly.

I generally think this is a lot of effort to give a race a simultaneous charisma penalty and bonus. Is that the goal? Without the full race, we won't really know.

> Bec de Corbins are multi-functional polearms.

This chart of yours isn't complete until it loops. Like, you gotta make the glaive-guisarme able to be a glaive and a guisarme, and the guisarme able to be a guisarme-voulge, and the guisarme-voulge able to wrap back around to glaive-guisarme. Just circularly link that list.

I doubt all the possible design things will be filled with just core though anyway, so I guess I wouldn't read into that in that fashion.

I disagree with OP's premise. I like the classic alignment chart just fine. I'm not here to persuade anyone about why it is just about perfect, though: plenty of players disagree on this.

I will offer this, I suppose: it's a hell of a lot easier to throw out the alignment system as a houserule, than it is to shove one in.

Heh, ok ty.

Is this just an issue everyone is talking about or did Paizo say something about Paladins?

I'm sure they'll respond to feedback and produce a game that runs well and has good options and mostly decent balance. I'm not even sure what type of feedback to provide, and how much about me I have to provide to make the feedback useful.

Ex: I'll never use the goblins as a PC race in any game I run. They're banned out the gate. But I wouldn't shy away from a game with them, nor am I concerned about toxic goblin players in org play (and if that becomes a meme, I'll think it's adorable). As a result, I'm totally neutral on them being in the PHB as a core race. I'd have preferred if it was kitsune or something with wings (or quite a few things), but these aren't normally appropriate as core choices, and at least those two would be very very controversial. I don't have to have a use for everything in the PHB for me to want it.

Additionally, banning a race is super easy for me: it's the ultimate in modular, campaign dependent choices.

Meanwhile, when we get to weapons, I'd love to see a bigger design space on weapons, especially one with holes in the space so that I can add weapons from history or from my world. I'd like to see greater differentiation, and a reason to use historically common, or at the very least, fantasy iconic, weapons. I don't want to be told a katana is a bastard sword, or go fully universal and be told that pretty much every one handed slashing martial weapon is the same. But I wouldn't be surprised if Paizo did go this direction, and if they do, I suspect all feedback to the contrary will be ignored- because it won't be that much.

I also have no use for "ancestry", and will use race in my games. This is also something I don't think will get pulled out: it sounds like they spent a lot of time on this system. It will also be hella hard to pull out without balance implications, unless I miss my guess terrible much. I mean, we'll see, but unless this system is implemented with a complete lack of competence (extremely unlikely), I suspect it will go live no matter what I think, and even if a lot of players agree with me (and I have no idea if they will).

So that's how I'd divide it:

1- Stuff that interferes with balance or is hella clunky - highly responsive
2- Stuff that is easy to unplug from games - they'll go with their intuition and direction and ignore feedback. DMs that hate these pieces will simply pull them out as they always have.
3- Stuff that they have spent a lot of effort building, even if it is hard to pull out - about as responsive as they can be.

The thing is, I'm pretty happy with PF1. If PF2 is just inspiration, then that's fine. If it's something I can jostle everything into position for, then that's fine too. A game doesn't need to grow forever to have players, and PF1 has grown tons over the years- it is truly vast.

While I'm sad this didn't get bumped in 2013 or 2016, I'm bumping this for 2018 because we still don't know what the heck happens with Time Sight as you level.

For the numerologists out there, we expect this thread to not be bumped in 2019, via extrapolation.

This ability is also interesting because there's three interpretations of this (literal- newer replaces the older, which is no longer available; additive- all apply when activated; selection- you choose when activating). Three interpretations, every third year doesn't have any bumps... Illuminati most obviously confirmed.

Ok, I have some serious issues with the feat.

First, you are having it deliver money to each PLAYER's character. This is a bad precedent: it maps something that isn't internal to the game world (number of players) to something that IS internal to the game world. If players Alice, Bob, and Charlie are running characters Andrew, Biggs, and Cothus, Cothus is going to be very confused if your PayDay doesn't pay him during a quest- and just try explaining to him that it's because Charlie had to work late and couldn't make gaming. He doesn't know who Charlie is, he's busy saving a world!

My second problem is, this is legit too much money by the game rules. It may be just fine given the campaign you are in. Assume you have a craft or profession that you have 20 ranks in, the max allowed. It's a class skill for you, so 23, and you have a +7 modifier, so 30. You work for a week, and roll the maximum number on the die. You make 25 gold that week.

Third, the pokemon move just scatters coins on the ground, which the winner (the player) picks up after the fight. The coins shouldn't pop up over anyone else, or be multiplied by the number of players.

Lets assume that you want PayDay to be better than a week's worth of work from a character of your level who is truly excellent for their level at their craft, because Meowths are cool like that. In fact, lets just make it twice as good. So at 20th level, we'd want PayDay to scatter 50 gold around, on average.

Here's my first version: Keep the Supernatural, and the Catfolk, and the week long cooldown. When PayDay hits a target in actual combat, it produces coins that are appropriate to the region you are in, worth (Character Level + Charisma Modifier) * 2d20 silver pieces. Gold pieces are produced preferentially, with the remainder in silver.

1)- If the weapon gains its enhancement bonus from magic, it is magic, and can bypass DR/magic, and counts as magic for having a chance to hit an incorporeal target. A masterwork weapon, unenchanted, has a +1 enhancement bonus to hit, but it won't do any of those things. Give that same sword a +1/+1 enhancement bonus magically, and it will suddenly work.

2)- "+3 weapon will bypass DR/silver, but Greater Magic Weapon +3 will not" Correct. However, the only reason this is true is because of text in the Greater Magic Weapon spell- if it had been written without that text, then it would. There's no overarching rule at play here.

If you want to replace race, replace it with species.

I'll second this. It's more accurate, and ancestry could be another thing. I'm sure they are really far along and all, but saying your species is elf and your ancestry is whatever, that's way hella better than just dropping ancestry on top of race and walking away, leaving a sack of +2 bonuses spilled all over the ground.

> Ancestry as term avoids the negative baggage of race

I don't think there's any baggage there, and certainly nothing negative. I assumed they were trying to, as you say, make it more broad or narrow, so you can map more things.

Wow, some of you guys really are all about the politics. Is this an appropriate forum for that discussion? Hopefully we see more pruned posts soon, there's no way that stuff is really on topic.

Eh, I wouldn't jump to assuming it is identity politics. It's probably just yet another attempt to add choice to character creation. If I really thought they had some political agenda to block the telling of a story not set in some world that works exactly according to some modern real world philosophy, I wouldn't be here providing feedback, I'd just be ignoring it.

Wait to see how integrated into the entire system it is, if it something that objectively adds player power (and as such pulling it out is a problem), etc.

I like monks as a core class. I'd like to see samurai and ninja in there too, but I suspect that, like most games, we'll be told that ninjas are rogues (or monks), and samurai are fighters, and then later, that will change with a splatbook.

It's silly the level of distinction that things get into with all these baseless classes that get shoved in as a game grows, but adding historically real character classes gets such pushback.

> I don't know if any other weapons in PF1 are named for a place in Switzerland

Probably not, but given that the characters don't speak English and don't call it a Lucerne Hammer, it follows pretty well that real world (mostly English) names are used for the weapons in the documents meant for players, and that the characters have names in their own languages, possibly named for function, gods, heroes, places, or however it is that they name things.

I mean, I'm opposed to every aspect of it. It's going to make certain backgrounds "correct" for a given character, meaning that instead of feeling you need to play some set of whatever races (usually a pretty big percent of races) to be playing "optimally", you'll instead need some set with a specific background.

The other part I'm opposed to is what it means to races. My game worlds don't have whatever this ancestry concept is, as races don't have this level of crossfertility, so out the gate I'd have to houserule away core concepts of character creation. At least I assume that's what's going on. I'm not even clear on that yet, but if it is something about nurture versus nature, that's probably even worse IMO.

It's very likely that PF2 is just not something I can ever run, so unless the remainder of the rules are absolutely perfect, it will just become something I use for inspiration. Obviously, it's too early for me to make any calls, but I don't want ancestries, I want races.

"female orc skald in our party and was facing off against the captain of these pirates, a large gnoll barbarian with a cyborg cannonball cannon arm"

This is so metal that reading it made my eyes spark irl

I think you made the right call. It's totally reasonable not to have these arrows ignite from the mage hand, and honestly, probably not even from the shaking. The mage hand can move something up to 30 feet a round (if you use your move and standard to move it). The mage hand can't pick up something that is magic (you might handwave and rule away this rule: it's probably in there to prevent some possible abuse of the spell that you may or may not run into).

So lets assume you ignore the bit about not picking up magical items. At the point where you are levitating a flaming object at someone, your brave orcess faces a new challenge- it's too slow to actually make an attack roll with. She could hurl it at someone, like a torch, and at least in 3.X that could deal 1d3 fire damage, but with mage hand she doesn't have the velocity to hit the guy if he's aware and reacting. If he's not aware, he'll become away when a fire is brought close to him- I'd probably rule something on the spot like, 1d3 damage, some basic reflex save for half, but properly, I don't think she can attack someone with mage hand. You need to do a lot of house rules with mage hand to actually get it to be any manner of weapon with something as simple as a flaming stick. By rules, you could probably find a way to levitate over some type of bomb or grenade (notice it has to be a mundane bomb or grenade), at which point it would lazily duplicate rules for throwing a splash weapon at a square.

> Pretty soon the whole dungeon is literally full of Carrion Claws

I mean, this is hilarious and I may heed this advice at some point, but I don't want to have to put a monster generator in every dungeon. After awhile, I suspect Blue Wizard may Need Food Badly.

The best house rule to force more dice rolling is to simply remove the options to Take 20 (and Take 10, if you so desire). It's a simple change, and it adds more randomness.

Yes, this would give me what I want. It makes searching for anything but loot reasonably lame and unrealistic though. I specifically want some loot that they may or may not find based on a dice roll: I'm not sure if I want this desire to map into all of search in general.

you could reasonably assume thet find the lower DC stuff first and if the neglect to keep looking then it's on them

Eh, I'm not trying to trick them into not finding stuff. I can (and do) sometimes put something with an unreasonably high search DC into a description, and if they do a certain action then they find the thing, but I don't want that to always have to happen in that way- that's more of a puzzle.

What are you trying to accomplish with this? Discourage the behaviour, or give them more?

Neither. I'm actually puzzled at how hard it has been to get across the message of "I want them to roll and have a chance to succeed or fail to find something".

End result if you really wanna just give them treasures or plot hooks, as the GM just give it to them

This isn't about that though.

I think what the OP is asking for is a way to not have foregone conclusions about what the party does and does not find in a dungeon. For a party that just takes 20, every secret is automatically sorted into piles of "does find" and "does not find". The OP is asking for ways to make these piles more random.

Yes, exactly. Or really any degree of random at all. Even a little random.

In the end though, from the players point of view, it really doesn't make a difference, does it? They know the things they find. They don't know about the things they don't find. They have no clue how random that is or not.

If I rolled their checks in secret, sure. But if I ask them to roll and they get a meaningful roll which sometimes results in loot and othertimes doesn't, then they will definitely have a die roll that they are super into, right? However it boils down to, if they nail a search and they find a cool thing, there's no way that won't have been an enjoyable experience, because they could have actually failed. Similarly, the party flubbing these rolls will have an impact as well.

it's just better to tell your players you are not going to allow Take 20 on Search checks

Maybe, but I don't really want to have to destroy Search checks just to be able to put some random loot in my dungeons. It seems like I'm throwing out the entire restroom with the bathwater.

Honestly, I already have enough custom stuff. I could probably figure out some stupid subsystem or whatever, I was just hoping that someone had came to a similar conclusion to me, and had solved it in their game. Instead, well, pretty much nobody even wants this in their games, so obviously it isn't a "problem" that they needed to "solve".

If the PCs succeed they find the book; if they fail then when they finally pry open the secret cabinet they find that a vial of Profane acid has eaten away the book's contents

I like that this works within the system. I'm not a huge fan that this kind of mechanic will get reasonably unbelievable if used over and over, with increasingly odd limitations (plus each of these mechanisms will ultimately be a puzzle unless I want to get really tyrannical: I'm sure someone will have a *Scroll Of Acid Doesn't Work For Some Reason And Remember When I Researched This LOL*. Again, that stuff is great: I just want to be able to have them roll and some loot pops out sometimes.

why put stuff in your dungeon you don't want the PCs to find?

Say I want the PCs to find 10,000 gp worth of gear over some span of rooms or space or time. I could put exactly that amount in, or I could put in 8,000 gp worth of loot that they will definitely find, and 4,000 gp worth of loot that they have a roughly 50/50 shot at finding. I believe this will be more fun. Hence, I'd be creating some loot, not that I don't WANT them to find, but that I want them to find roughly half of, unbeknownst to me or them. I'd like to do this without blowing up core rules about searching, or routinely ending up with silly things like the highly perceptive barbarian not being able to nail a roll above 3 or whatever.

Hopefully your players know you intend to devalue the Perception skill before they allocate their skill ranks.

Doing what I talk about would not devalue Perception at all. You'd still want every plus available. It's in part because these guys are all putting one rank per level in there that I want it to have some other effect. If anything, it will be rewarding for the guys without decent Wisdom or class skill to sometimes be the guy that yanks a ring out, through the strength of his roll. Ideally, without it becoming just a festival of dice rolls that screws the guy who has more than just ranks invested.

Taking the "why" up a level: In what way would making the discovery of hidden things more random improve your game?

"Roll a die well to win a small prize" is a mechanic I dare anyone to imply would not be enjoyable. How do I get there without it becoming "Roll a die excellently or be penalized"?

Let them take 20 and find something trapped with Weird.

I'm not trying to punish them for searching.

Yes, that's conclusion as well.

As a result of the E6 ruleset, I'll need to add them. Off to homebrew for some of that I guess.

....I mean, they still shouldn't be all QQ at level three tho.