thenobledrake's page

Back when I first saw discussion about how to handle weaknesses based on the text someone mentioned a dev comment that happened during the playtest so might have been about a prior version rather than the final rule. Yet that example of a holy avenger triggering both a balor's cold iron and good weaknesses for 40 extra damage per hit rather than "got hit by this sword" being "one instance of dammage" turned out to be correct.

In a way, I found there to be sense in that because it would feel strange for a weapon explicitly designed for fiend fighting to have redundant features that make it more like the design of thew weapon was fighting fiends (where the holy covers everything you'd need) and also for fighting fey (where the cold iron would matter).

Yet I never immagined that it would be intended that "one instance of damage" would be split even more narrow than each type of damage being done. Especially not when that makes it so that it's not a holy avenger that is the best at slaying a balor, it's however many different sources of cold damage you can stack onto each hit at 20 damage a pop in a system that treats +1d6 of damage or +8 damage as a big deal.

And now that Paizo has clearly said that is the case all I can think is that someone goofed. Not just because this changes the meta for fighting enemies with weaknesses, but because the rule is awkward to apply and strangely worded because it seems like a non-exhaustive list of example situations that are only one instance of damage despite satisfying different weaknesses when it is actually just the only time that happens and you can actually apply the same weakness multiple times even though that seems intuitively opposite of the rest of the system and its usual handling of "what if that same type of thing, but again?" questions.

I thought frequent complaints of the crunchy images in PDF products had led to Paizo doing less compression on files, but I could be misremembering.

It certainly would explain the difference, though.

Absent any guidance that is the default. I see no reason to rule it otherwise.

The default is presented as being anything with a critical success will call it out.

People doing the easy thing that is misremembering what the book says in a convenient way so that they think words show up in parts of the rules where they don't doesn't mean it's actually a strong argument rather than an easy mistake to make.

For example, the term "critical success" isn't even found under the [url=https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2288]attack rolls heading./url].

And the text in "Degrees of Success" says "Some actions and abilities have stronger effects on a critical success or failure. For example, a Strike deals double damage on a critical hit. If an effect doesn't list a critical success effect, the critical success effect is the same as the success effect, and the same goes for critical failures." not that we should be assuming all things do unless told otherwise.

So what mix of creatures would it take to make the new IW equal to the old one? Then, once you have your list of creatures, of all the combinations possible from all 1st party sources, what percentage of combinations work out to the new IW being equal to or better than the old one?

Neither of those things have anything to do with what I am trying to add to this conversation, so are not up to me to bother trying to figure out.

The purpose behind the point I've been trying to get a few posters to realize is this; If your proof that Paizo needs to change something is that it doesn't do X, that cannot successfully convince them if they never intended for it to do X.

See all the complaints that magic in general doesn't feel powerful enough and how no general buff to magic has happened because Paizo doesn't see those complaints as relevant because they never intended to provide that feeling of magic.

Except we do, because we still have literally every first party published adventure as evidence.

You are misapplying evidence.

Each AP is only accurate as far as "whatever the author picked", and even then only as far as that is not made inaccurate by "or the GM changed it to." Which are functionally identical to "whatever the GM picks" being the only thing we actually have to tell us - in a fashion that isn't explicitly limited to only a specific campaign, AP or otherwise - what creatures are in any given campaign and how frequent they are within it.

Percentage of creatures having a particular ability is not percentage chance that ability shows up in a campaign. Percentage of AP encounters that include a particular creature is not the percentage chance that creature shows up in a campaign.

They are not even directly related to the chance of things coming up in a campaign because GM bias exists (and authors have it too).

And this is why the creature selection within, to grab some examples, Age of Ashes and Blood Lords are fairly dissimilar. And since any GM out there in the world could easily have never read either, it's intellectually bankrupt to think either would have any measurable effect upon what creatures that GM chooses to use in their campaign.

Which is why it's not useful to use "this new version would suck in these old APs" to try and convince Paizo there is a problem because their balance strategy only cares about performance in a niche when the niche does come up even if said niche isn't in one of their APs (which are, again, and it's exhausting to have to say this, not necessarily even being played at most tables because home-spun campaigns have historically always been more affordable.)

And then there is the also-related fact that AP writing isn't actually intended to be the end-all and be-all of campaign plans and styles. The format inherently takes on limitations that don't exist within the didn't-pay-extra-to-get-this-part game.

This is not a good faith discussion at this point.

Because you have closed your mind to the very possibility that you could be mistaken.

You think I'm talking about some vague mysterious concept when what I'm actually saying is, to phrase it differently one final time before leaving you to sit in your unassailable fortress of false consensus effect, which AP you are going to play next doesn't have any affect on what someone else's group is going to play next so maybe what has been true of monster selection in your personal experience has nothing to do with anyone else's personal experience.

You're too busy trying to win an argument you haven't given yourself time to actually think about what I've been saying. You keep framing it as if I'm trying to say "the nerf is fine" or even "there is no nerf" when what I'm saying is "you're not going to convince Paizo this is a bad change by pretending you have data you don't." I'm trying to help you make a better argument, not prove you wrong (about the nerf being bad for the game, at least... you're unquestionably wrong about APs having any use as proof of what most games will be like).

Basically anything is possible, this is a ridiculous way to balance options. You need to balance this based on if they are plausible, not merely possible.

In order to determine how plausible something is one would have to limit variability in play styles the game supports.

Quite literally, you have to have a significant degree of sameness between campaigns in order to balance around the idea of how likely frequently something occurs.

Paizo picked different than you would have. That's all this "ridiculous" declaration proves.

Essentially by your logic, a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to Will saves is just as good as a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to all saving throws because technically there is a non-zero chance that you will only have to roll will saving throws in a campaign, and we of course, have no way to answer how likely that would be because that would be akin to rolling a dice for what you next campaign is going to be like.

You just said 'by my logic' and then tossed a bunch of nonsense I never even remotely said and isn't at all consistent with my logic into my mouth.

My actual logic is more along the lines of this: Cat fall isn't entirely useless because a lot of people run scenarios wherein falling off of things basically never happens, and isn't a waste of space in the book that should be removed because of that either. It's a feat Paizo designed on a balance point on that is based entirely on what it does when it does come up, because that's how they chose to balance the game.

Now, I will clarify they aren't perfect at doing this kind of balance and still have tossed in some things that suck even within their perspective niches (like Quick Disguise since the difference between 1 minute and 10 minutes is often not different enough for the feat to change not having time for a disguise into having time, though that does get alleviated by higher rank usage).

Which is why my statement in the thread is not that the new version isn't worse than the old one; it's that none of us actually know with any certainty what "most campaigns" look like so that isn't a useful thing to try and use as proof that Paizo needs to change the new version again.

Maybe it's because you are pretending like it's impossible to make any claim without a scientific study behind it.

Nope, that's still just you insisting I'm wrong by default by framing the very disagreement as impossible instead of actually engaging with the idea I presented.

You claim I'm asking for a "scientific study" when all I am asking for is a singular self-selected check where you actually show the work to arrive at your "99.9% of campaigns" claims instead of pretending like it is controversial for me to say "any given pair of GMs and/or authors have no particular reason pushing them toward particular creature choices, so they are probably going to pick different stuff"

Accusing others of invoking abuser tactics over a class discussion? Mods don't get paid enough for this s%~*.

Especially when the accusation of gaslighting is accompanied by text that implies it's not the people framing someone's statements as made up nonsense that are gaslighting, but rather me for daring to introduce the fact that someone citing "most campaigns" as proof of their argument doesn't actually have the data set necessary to make that kind of statement.

So it's the good ol' poison the well by insisting different opinion must be inappropriate behavior and not legitimate.

No, you made up a criteria, claimed it can't be measured, and don't like that it can in fact be measured because the answer disagrees with what you want it to be.

Physician, heal thy self.

I have not made up the criteria any more, nor any less, than you have. That's my point.

We can each know what is typical of our own campaigns. We can each look at what is typical of adventure paths. We each should realize those two things are not necessarily the same, just as what is typical of my own campaigns has no direct relationship to what is typical of yours and vice versa.

The only actual difference between our two views of the game is that I acknowledge my own potential to not be representative of "most campaigns" because we do not have the data necessary to back that kind of a claim up.

...all the math very clearly says it's a nerf in every published adventure.

You're misunderstanding my argument.

I never said this isn't a nerf.

I said it isn't outside of Paizo's intended balance after being nerfed because they don't balance the game the way you think they do because unlike you they acknowledge they know what is possible with their game materials, but not what is probable because there is not actually any universal factor that makes any given creature on the books any different in probability to get used than any other creature on the books.

Which is why I don't bring up how many creatures have X trait or what percentage of encounters would have to include that trait vs not for the math to equal out and instead have simply mentioned that in the cases where force damage matters it matters by more of a degree than is typical of most other damage types in their cases where it matters.

It's just like how there are skill feats many people view as useless not because the effect they have when their niche occurs is not enough in that moment, but because the niche in question is one that "hardly ever comes up". Paizo clearly does not care how often that niche comes up in your campaigns. They clearly only care how potent an option is within its niche. They include those things that "no one ever takes because it is rare you even get to benefit" because they clearly want a completely different style of campaign than what is being viewed as "most campaigns" in these assessments to be not just possible, but also not over-powered by options tuned up so high as to appeal to people running a complete different kind of campaign from theirs.

And again, for clarity, I'm not even saying this is a good thing to do. I a just pointing out that it is, based on all available evidence, what Paizo have chosen to do. The only reason I even bother is because it benefits us all as part of the community to realize that our own experiences are not necessarily in line with the majority so at the very least we can drop the fallacious arguments that equate to "100% of the games I run are run the way I run games, so all other GMs either run basically the same as I do or they are edge cases we should totally ignore."

Which again, the proof here is simple; If you can't say what the chance is that any given GM starts their next campaign with battling goblins, you can't say with any more accuracy than "whatever the GM picks" what encounters are going to be.

So stop the "my experience is typical and other people's is weird" thinking and join me in "both our experiences are typical, and nothing alike, because that's how the game has always worked" thinking, it can only improve your ability to understand TTRPGs in general.

Bad wording is as hard of fix for some people as bad math is for some people. Which is to say "obviously just read it differently" is equal to "obviously these numbers are wrong and it should be these other numbers".

There's no reason to push writing that causes someone to have to consider if there is a reason the wording is what it is instead of a more natural sentence that would make more sense down some imagined priority-ordered list. It's not like the errata team is picking a number of things to fix and stopping at that no matter what, so bringing this "it goes out of its way to not include concealment when neither party is within the cloud, and professional writers should have realized that, so is that intentional even though it seems like a strange choice?" question up is unlikely to prevent some other "top of the list" thing from getting attention.

If you're playing a published AP, which is a pretty common method of play, then since it's published it's easy for anyone with the AP to determine by looking at the fights.

You're effectively dodging the point by looking at cause and effect in reverse.

To highlight, I ask you to tell me which AP is most likely to be the next AP any given group choose to play.

You're basically say the die roll turning out how it did means that is what the odds were in favor of happening.

and all while presuming by-the-book AP play to be the norm which even Paizo assumes people are changing stuff up. Further, one of the motivators mentioned in the change from 6 book APs to include more shorter-length APs like the 3 book ones is the sales showing fewer people actually buying later books. So even among people that play APs the selection of creatures in any given one is no more "how we know what the game is supposed to be like" than any other.

The answer is obviously the latter in 99.99% of campaigns.

You are conflating what you feel to be true with having actual measurements.

We do not know what 99.9% of campaigns look like. We cannot say how many of any given set of 12 campaigns include X number of Y creature.

You can evaluate this by testing for yourself; I have run 13 campaigns that utilized AP products. If you can even remotely accurately say what campaigns look like by a means other than reading records of what already happened, tell me how many barghest encounters my group has had.

I don't want you to guess. I want you to realize that without knowing which AP products I used, and how many times I used each, you don't have enough information for your response to not be a guess.

The reality is that every selection of creatures, whether for a home-spun campaign or an AP published by Paizo, is equally contrived. That includes both "it's got some goblins, some wild animals, and a few named NPCs with class builds" and "it's pretty much entirely shadows, specters, and wraiths" equally because there is no % chance that the next encounter will fulfill any given criteria.

<snipped for space>

You're missing the core fundamental point of what I am saying, so I'm going to try and come at it from a completely different phrasing:

Which enemy is more common in the next campaign I'm going to play, an incorporeal creature or one where the best choice of damage would be slashing?

The question is rhetorical because there's no way to actually accurately answer that. How many different creatures are in the book that fit one criteria or the other is entirely irrelevant to the actual process of a GM choosing creatures. Even if had asked which is more common between frost giants and fire giants the answer can only ever be "depends on the campaign."

Paizo knows that and designs the game around their knowing that, which is how they land on making force damage lower die size than other damage types in the name of fairness - not because it's generally better, but because the times that it matters whether it is force damage or not are ones in which it generally has a larger degree of mattering.

The overall spread of monsters in the game is the closest thing we have to an assumption we can follow.

That was my point; the "closest thing we have" is something that we are explicitly aware does not actually mean anything.

And why we know that is that this bit:

Most games are going to be following this spread to a certain degree, with bias for or against some enemy types.

Is incredibly inaccurate.

Most games don't have any measurable degree of bias from the spread they are allegedly following "to a certain degree". Not because there is no bias, but because there is nothing but bias. The entire method of creature selection for a campaign is bias-driven, even when the bias involved happens to be the GM intentionally trying to make sure they are choosing in a way that lines up with the overall spread of abilities - a thing most GMs are not even aware of because it requires analyzing every creature rather than just picking what looks cool or fits their theme.

The alternative is treating each option in the game like it is constantly in a favourable scenario, which is more unrealistic and absurd.

This is also, for better or worse, how Paizo balances options.

It's not even that unrealistic; a campaign scenario exists in which the feature performs as desired, any situation in which it under-performs can be identified as "not when this is meant to shine", and there's no cases of over-performance. The only reason people object to this balance approach is that it means that the game has numerous "bad" options that are not actually "bad", they just aren't for the situations your biases make common in a campaign.

A thing which blurs balance discussion at large because there are things which are actually bad, even though "it's only good in certain situations" isn't a reason for something to be bad.

Looking at things overall is certainly not perfect, but it's likely the closest you're going to get to an accurate picture.

...in some rare campaigns (like <0.1%) of campaigns...

You are letting bias mislead you.

You don't know the numbers that would be required for the declarations of "rare"and "<0.1%" to be accurate. Paizo also knows they don't, and can't feasibly, know that... which is why they balance the game the way they do.

Bluemagetim wrote:

Well it doesn't matter how many enemies exist in the monster core with those resistances, it depends on how many exist in your game

So Paizo should balance options based on how useful they could be in one game where the GM essentially caters to that option being the most optimal thing rather than how useful it will be overall?

The issue at hand here is that there is no "overall".

The number of creatures in the roster the game presents that have X feature has no guaranteed and measurable relationship to the number of those creatures that will be encountered in any given campaign.

In order to measure "overall" accurately we'd have to assume every group will have their campaigns line up as having done all of the same things over the same period of time. That's not how things work.

Most every GM I know would run a cave worm lethally like that (with either sky spitting or with burying).

I don't much understand why many of you wouldn't expect that more often than not.

Because paranoia-based play is not enjoyable for me on either side of the table, and of all the players I've personally met that have said they enjoy the style of play it was indistinguishable from not actually liking that style of play and incorrectly seeing it as the only alternative to the frequent character deaths they like even less.

thenobledrake wrote:

It took 3 years to issue errata. It took an instant to fix because it was obvious upon reading it how it should work.

If there is absolutely no importance, if there is no one who is unsure about this, why do you think it is continually in the errata thread?

Because it is an error and therefor should be fixed via errata.

You're conflating things which are absolutely not related; an error being a real error, and errors persisting even after errata is issued, has no bearing on what impact that error has on people playing the game in practical terms.

...instances of damage should have been resolved 5 years ago I'd think?

That's actually a great point for how not actually important errata is in practical terms.

I have known that text was unclear for the entire time. I have run Pathfinder 2e at least once a week, if not multiple times per week, for the entire time save the last few months. I have had this text being unclear affect my play experience zero times.

It's such a non-issue that I'm not even sure if there has been a moment of needing to explain happen at the table, so it probably just auto-errata'd itself by way of how my group thought it should work being a shared opinion so no one thought anything weird was happening.

Hell: Arcane Cascade literally didn't work and that took 3 years to fix due to the old errata policy. The new errata policy was supposed to avoid that kind of thing, and yet here we are.

It took 3 years to issue errata. It took an instant to fix because it was obvious upon reading it how it should work.

And the developers of this game have full confidence in the players of the game that these fixes are not just something we are capable of, but are things we're going to do no matter what they say is the "official fix". Decoupling what gets to be on the "we have time to issue some fixes" list from print runs doesn't change that.

We don't need to know how many spells a spellcaster knows because someone might house rule it?

That's being deliberately obtuse.

What I actually said, applied to the context I believe you're talking about, is every group looking at Oracle saying 2 different things knows which one they want to be fixed to match the other.

That's why it isn't as high of a priority as people will try to make it into that errata come out quickly; it's not actually causing insurmountable issues at the table.

We also have more people then ever playing in spaces, VTTs, where they can't house rule things.

Every VTT I've ever used has been capable of house-ruling things on.

And I mean that in more than just the way that you can house-rule by human tracking something instead of leaving to the program.

So even when applying the actually entirely unreasonable expectation that Paizo be responsible for making sure a program they have no direct input into the programming of work the way someone happens to want it to, it's still not "I can't run this how I think it should work because that's different than the literal words in the book right now."

Quick answers aren't a thing because when they were it was a direct traceable cause and effect through the process of people engaging in arguments and name-calling with the staff trying to answer questions, which incidentally also turned into at least one staff member at the time joining in on the interactions being lacking in respect and decorum.

Yes, people are already currently grumpy about not having official answers. There is no way to prevent that because books cannot be printed without flaw. And since some of the things people are wanting an answer on aren't even "I'm not sure what this says" in nature and are actually already just "I don't think what the book clearly says is true is supposed to be true" we can already see that it's not a case of people just wanting an answer that is official in nature; it is a case that people want what they will view as the correct official answer.

That, and the devs knowing that despite how severe a problem might actually be each group can implement what they would want the official answer to be and play on, contributes to a situation where it is actually best for everyone involved, customer and company alike, that they stay willing to errata things over time as they are confident about re-wording them yet staying entirely away from the asked for "do it faster somehow" requests.

For every "it only takes a few minutes to answer" there is a "you're going to house-rule it if you don't like the answer" proving that the answer isn't as needed as people are claiming.

exequiel759 wrote:

I'm surprised TTRPGs (to my knowledge) haven't tried making sneak attacks automatic crit attacks...

Isn't that pretty much what backstabbing attacks were back in AD&D (and maybe 3e, I'm not a D&D player except by 1980's childhood origins) days? Was just a straight multiplier to the damage you did, like a cit in PF2e is!

Effectively, yes.

And it is also worth noting that if you go back to early enough D&D rules you arrive at a point where backstab is functionally the same as saying "with set-up you get a critical hit no your first attack of an encounter" and it is also the only critical-hit-like effect in the game since critical hits were optional prior to 3rd edition.

It also had the benefit of not being as huge of an impact that you couldn't backstab something because it was losing a typically no more than once per encounter damage boost in a game where damage boosts weren't as big of a deal because hit point pools generally weren't as high so diminishing returns set in faster. Unlike the modern case where if you're facing a foe you can't apply precision damage to you're losing as much of 2/3rds of your damage for the entire encounter.

There's limits to how far you can push the gameism to break immersion and being fine with walking on the moon but your armor can't help you stand on top of mount everest doesn't just break that it nukes it.

I just now started looking into Starfinder since it is technically PF2 compatible.

And basically the first thing I end up seeing in the rule-book is that a character is in a fine-unless-they-aren't situation when it comes to being outside of typical breathable atmospheric conditions.

Need to do repairs outside your starship? The basic protections imply you are fine by saying you're protected from vacuum. Yet if you're standing in vacuum and totally not having your air supply sucked out into said vacuum and someone tosses a gas grenade at you the environment outside your suit is no longer fully separate from the environment inside your suit.

Then add the thermal capacitor upgrade to the mix and either we land on player expectation and genre shattered together as "I'll go out and repair the ship" turns lethal because the vacuum of space has an extreme temperature the character isn't actually protected from. Or else it tells us that actually, in this space fantasy setting, space is normally a comfortably moderate temperature so you don't need protection from temperature just to be able to exist safely in it.

Which is to say this is a weird thing to need to house-rule in an "space adventure" kind of game. Not a hard house-rule to figure out, just awkward to have to.

I definitely don't like the idea of balancing a game so that some characters are good in combat and others good out of combat.

It tends to lead to "It's my turn to play for a while. You guys wait until the next fight."

I think a lot of people manage to not realize that one of the main calling cards of a system that does the "you're good in a different part of play so you're not good at this part of pay" thing is players checking out.

It's like how people will fiddle with their phone until their turn gets called in combat, but turned up to an even higher degree.

And also a byproduct of players trying to self-correct the problem it causes is for all the players to take combat-leaning options and then try to turn everything they can into a combat since that usually works given that the failure condition most frequently assigned to non-combat efforts is to have combat. So they steer into it to minimize how much session time feels like "I'm waiting to play." even though their GM is likely going to ramp up combat difficulty to try and account for the combat-heavy party and incidentally increase time between turns as a result.

I don't really agree with "in PF1e is more fun to build characters"...

I also do not agree with that statement because it implies there's no possibility that a person recognizes that if you build a character "well" you will be able to regularly overcome much more potent challenges than if you build a character in some other fashion and then views that as a flaw in the game.

I personally hated building PF1 (and D&D 3.x before it) characters because I would have to weigh every choice made against whether it would cause me to overshadow the potency of other players' characters or be the potential beginning of arms race behavior with the GM (where they make challenges harder to try and challenge a potent character, only to have to continue increasing challenge because players respond to that with finding a way to be less challenged, typically because the actual desire is not to find the highest objective level of challenge they can still overcome, it is rather just to have the feeling of challenge while remaining confident in ability to overcome, so increasing the challenge is actually the opposite of what the players are looking for).

And I hate the alternatives to that, too, where I push the more mechanically potent character ideas on other players no matter what they are actually interested in just so we can all have a similar power level. Which I especially disliked while I was GMing but felt I had to do because the other outcome was someone unintentionally having a more potent character and taking up an unfair share of the spotlight.

This is likely just a case of which words the particular writer picked to use, since there's very little difference in the outcome.

However, since there is a little bit of difference given that "very hard DC for a level that's twice the ritual's spell rank." is usually 1 point of DC higher (2 points at ranks 3, 6, and 9) than it would be if the text instead said "the typical DC for a spell of its rank adjusted by a very hard modifier" there is some potential for it to have been a deliberate thing to make the DC just that extra little bit higher as part of offsetting the potential modifiers.

Though typing out that last paragraph and having to actually try to work out how to word the sentence setting the DC by mentioning the usual DC by spell rank and still not liking the phrasing after settling on something, I'd say my money is on the author picking the wording they did for the sake of it having been the easier way to communicate clearly and cleanly.

Stack the deck so you survive the bad luck, or accept the outcome.

There is an unfortunate overlap in games which have stronger consequences for bad luck and games which don't have much practical potential for stacking the deck.

Pathfinder, for example, places most stacking the deck that players could do on the other side of GM collaboration. That's not even necessarily a bad thing in terms of the design of the game because the GM should already be a cooperative element in leading the group towards desired game-play experiences, yet it is an obstacle to the activities in question because if the GM isn't always accurately foreshadowing incoming challenges so the player can be informed enough to know what stacks the deck in their favor the player is literally just hoping and guessing.

And more importantly I think there's a thought to have here; you have basically said "alter your odds so that you like them" which is a good piece of advice for anyone. Then you present that what should be done if you're not willing to do that is "shut up about not liking the outcome." Which since it's not actually fully within the player's ability to control is basically just saying "try to get what you'd actually enjoy, and if it doesn't work out I don't even remotely care and won't consider your displeasure about it to be valid." Which is not at all helpful to anyone.

Is any combat scenario ever really low to mid-risk?

Yes. Firstly and most obviously because combat risk is a relative scale so no matter whether you're talking about all combat as being a significant chance of death or talking about combat which requires 1 in 160,000 or narrower odds to actually result in a death something will be the low point of the range.

And secondly yes because combat does not actually necessitate parameters that involve death or other intense consequences, so some combats can remain lower risk despite higher chances that the party does not emerge victorious.

Dying in character creation is a punishment for being risky in character creation.

The only time I've personally seen death during character creation be a thing it was entirely down to random chance. I mean, I guess technically one of the creation systems I saw it in you could start your character before rolling on the next segment of character creation, but that is presented to players in a way that it's kind of equivalent to if Pathfinder said "next you can gain the second half of your starting class features like your skill trainings that aren't automatically set, but you also might die if you try." and even hides the potential for dying so you have to read ahead or roll it to find out instead of actually accurately framing that there's a reason to not respond to being able to roll 0+ times with "Well, I should do at least 1 since it's part of character creation."

And again I feel the need to point out that this isn't actually a real punishment that makes any practical sense because there's no practical reason for a player to not take the risk. It's not "I'd better not because [reasons]", it's just "I'll keep rolling until a character survives creation." Even when it comes to the potentiality of it having been multiple rolls to get the extra benefits there is nothing besides the GM arbitrating a limit or the player having gotten the result they wanted to stop simply continuing to roll until they get what they want.
The "punishment" is actually if you just want to be done creating your character already because you don't get all the goodies people get for letting the dice decide how much longer it will take, since that's the only behavior option you can take that has a downside to it that matters and isn't GM-derived.

A system like that, keeping away players that won't vibe with the game's ethos, is a good thing.

You're conflating two entirely unrelated things.

Signposting the style and tone of your game so people can be accurately informed as to whether it is their kind of thing or not is a good thing.

Obnoxious design that doesn't actually have anything to do with the style or tone of the game so even people that would love the game once they are allowed to play it might be trolled away from it before finding out whether or not the game is for them is a bad thing.

And if you think the bad thing is actually a good thing, that's the foundation of gatekeeping and elitism. There's literally no reason to risk annoying a play away from giving an honest shot to a game other than so that people that toughed out the deliberate annoyance can use it as a pretense to claim superiority.

That's what death during character creation is; it's not the style of the game because it's not game-play, it is just an annoyance. It doesn't even prepare someone for most of the games that I know of that have used it because once you get a character in play your chances of dying, despite being high, are always attached to choices which have obvious consequences - a completely different case than the "roll here for more character details unless you want to skip it, oops you died" lol-so-random character creation. So if a player believed that the game was going to operate in the same fashion of death being an entirely random consequence for attempting to do anything - if they believed what the game was telling them at that point - they would have an inaccurate impression of how the game worked.

So you've basically just misapplied "it's not for everyone" as being free license for designers to literally try to stop people from even knowing what a game is like because you've misconstrued people stopping playing as an inherently good thing.

Or we just have groups that understand that a game that uses dice inherently opens the door for bad luck. Some people like PF2's character builder and very guardrailed systems, and some people are risking their character in the creation phase while rolling up a Traveller.

You're treating things as exclusive to each other when they aren't.

You also might be doing the thing many people do where they hold a belief without ever questioning it even as the moments pop up that outsiders can point to as a reason why questioning the belief would make sense.

Because you're not actually talking about the difference between an open door for bad luck and a closed door for bad luck. I laugh off bad luck easily; in my most recent session of PF2 I critically failed 5 times, even including managing to have 2 hero points provide me natural 1s.

It's very easy to have the "haha, that was dumb. Great sessions guys, see you next time." reaction because those staggeringly bad rolls had small consequences. I basically just made it take longer to complete a goal the party was working towards because these didn't happen in combat. Even if they had happened in combat, I would have been able to laugh it off so long as my character made it through with no lasting downside.

But if a game makes it so that any bad luck even close to what I experience means massive consequences like sitting out of play or having to say goodbye to the character I have to stop and ask "Why?" I mean, it's one thing if I'm satisfied with having played the character and ready to try something new or if I've intentionally maneuvered my character into risky circumstances, and an entirely different thing if I basically can't ever be in low- to mid-risk scenarios in the first place because of how a games dice mechanics work.

And the "die while creating your character" thing is a great example. In my experience no one is actually amused by those results. It's like rolling for ability scores; even the people that "love" doing it are actually meaning that they love when it goes a particular way - and most of them are going to keep at the random tries until it does go that particular way. The bad results are not a thing they actively enjoy and are not even a thing which improves their enjoyment by providing contrast, they are just a time sink and a pretense that are tolerated because the rest of what happens once they have passed is actually enjoyed. And instead of questioning whether "I like random character creation" deserves an asterisk elaborating upon the points which could actually be removed without spoiling the experience, it's just "I like random character creation." Even as they sigh and groan about the result they rolled this time being obnoxious.

Meanwhile I'm over here thinking death during character creation sounds a lot like a video game crashing when you try to start a new game. It's not even really "quirky" for it to have been an on-purpose possibility, it's just someone having had an idea and run with it because they don't care how their choices relate to player psychology, or because they didn't even have the design sense to consider what a player would be experiencing while attempting to play the game from any perspective other than their own.

A more predictable game is also more favorable to the GM, too. The GM and the PCs are not enemies

This is a very important factor for me in how I pick which systems to run; how close to my expectations for a scenario that scenario will play out in practice.

The reason being that I've had plenty of experiences with systems that have lower predictability that lead to player disappointment. The most flagrant of examples I can give being that I was running Dungeon Crawl Classics and decided that I would have an enemy cast a spell and while I checked the spell results chart to see what the spell could potentially do before the session, I had not remembered the extra boost to the result that would result from a critical result. So when the spell was cast and the critical was rolled, it obliterated the entire party with no chance of mitigation.

So now those players don't want to do anything with DCC beyond one-shots, no matter how much I profess to them that I won't have an enemy cast a spell with random effects ever again.

I think there are some GMs that don't think about the predictability of outcomes as being such an important thing because they are artificially setting the predictability by way of being willing to fudge their dice rolls. Since it's logically less important to have random undesired outcomes be genuinely impossible when you're already set on pretending results you didn't want didn't happen in the first place.

Since the prior case before the adjustment was that the effect dropped off at the start of the champion's turn and the change was to make that actually happen at the end of the champion's turn so that at the very least the champion gains the benefit, it is definitionally not a "nerf."

As shroudb points out, this is just the reality of duration being tied to turn timing.

In this specific case, I think the important thing to remember is that the effect that may or may not last all that long is actually the secondary benefit - the main point of the reaction, to protect an ally from damage, works equally well regardless of how the initiative rolls happen to have turned out.

That seems directly at odds with James Jacob's GM advice at the start of Abomination Vaults, which states:

Yup. James did want to have the "you might find your way to tougher encounters depend on which way you choose to go" aspect of the old-style dungeon crawls, but is not an incompetent enough designer to actually have wanted taking a wrong turn to be an actual death sentence for the characters because... well, to phrase it as simply as possible; there's a reason why that's no longer the generally accepted design approach and why even back when it was the generally accepted design approach significant numbers of groups made alterations or various kinds to mitigate the impact of that kind of design.

I feel like it's just another example of the gamer phenomena in which someone touts a particular unhelpful design choice as being actually good as a matter of ego and then mitigates it for themself while treating self-mitigation as fine to do even if the result is the same as the designed-mitigation they are decrying as a bad thing. Like how video gamers will insist they prefer games that don't tell them what they are supposed to be doing in any clear and direct fashion and then happily look up a guide to find out what they swore they didn't actually want to be told.

Gotta disagree about the level 1 thing. I had an encounter in Abomination Vaults at level 3 where a +2 lvl caster cast a Chilling Darkness at our cloistered cleric, critted and would have massive damaged the character from 100% to -100% in one shot, if I hadn't forgotten that, yes, clerics of Sarenrae are indeed sanctified holy. 10d6 times two via critical hit can absolutely kill a character with massive damage even at level 3, if you roll just a little above average.

I've also seen some spells get right up next to invoking the massive damage rules but not actually trigger it because the player happened to decide to boost Constitution.

It actually takes quite a few levels before all characters (even 6 ancestry HP and didn't spend boosts on Con ones) are not at risk of a BBEG's top rank spell getting a critical amount of damage and a decent damage roll triggering massive damage rules.

An average critical for a disintegrate for example is 132 damage, which means it would massive damage kill any character with only 66 maximum HP which could be a level 10 elven wizard. An actual high roll for the damage, which could go as high as 240 with a critical makes it so even a level 10 dwarven fighter with a +1 constitution modifier is straight up dead if they manage a critical failure result. Demonstrating that a wide variety of characters that are in a relatively high level boss fight against a level +2 caster can still have a chance to see a massive damage rule kill them off.

The wording involved is pretty rough because of phrasing choices.

"...all your Swipe attacks" being an odd thing to say when there is only one attack roll involved. It's clear enough that the intention is to add the bonus from the Swipe trait to the total of the attack roll when comparing it to both targets instead of just to one target, but it's definitely not the clearest way to state that. Even just "If you're using a weapon with the sweep trait, its modifier applies to this attack roll." would be cleaner.

Despite that oddness of phrasing, though, I feel it's indicative of the intention that the Swipe activity be the equivalent of two attacks in every way other than those specifically stated - which are that sweep applies to both targets rather than just whichever was second, and instead of rolling the attack and damage rolls for the second target you just apply the same result as for the first target.

I don't see any reason in that to not have critical specialization apply for both targets, whether it's an axe specialization adding some damage to a nearby target, a sword leaving both flat-footed, or a flail causing both to have to save or fall prone.

I don't get how this is somehow me stating "bad wrong fun" when I'm describing a personal experience as shared one.

It's the language you use.

Much like how there is a difference between if I were to say "I am not a fan of the sort of challenge that you're looking for from combat" which is respectful of your opinion as being different but equally valid, and if I were to say "I don't want all that tryhard nonsense".

When you describe not-your-preference with terms like "lobotomy" you cross the line between just sharing your own personal experience and making a value judgement upon preferences other than your own.

And the mire just deepens as you say things like "the players are expected to take the narrative seriously, which includes encounter mode" as if that is not equally true of games that don't match your difficulty preference because you're adding implications that there's really only your way of playing and complete nonsense where nothing matters.

It feels incredibly cheap every time the GM blatantly lobotomizes a foe to prevent them from killing the PCs.

Multiple people have already asked people to not turn this into "badwrongfun" comments.

So let me explain how this is a problem statement; You're presuming that the options are either A) monsters do what you personally have decided makes sense for them to do, or B) Blatant lobotomization.

That's not how things actually work, though. There's a whole range of things which creatures can do that make equal amounts of sense in-fiction while still producing different game difficulty results - especially if encounters are designed with victory parameters outside of reducing the opposition to 0 collective HP.

There's little worse for the feeling of victory and "merit" than for the player to realize the GM is cheating in their favor, and will defy logic to bail them out any time there's real danger.

This is a thing where it's not actually down to the players having something hidden from them that they will be disappointed by finding out - at least not outside of literal fudging, which is a separate topic entirely and I think I discourage people from doing.

The reality of the game is, and always remains, that the GM is setting the degree of challenge. No matter what degree they set it to, that remains true. Thus the only way that the GM is able to "bail them out any time there's real danger" is if the GM is behaving in an inconsistent manner.

By which I mean it is not an encounter that is set up by me and run by me in my style the entire time I am running it that will feel like the players are getting some kind of illogical bail out - characters will die if their choices and the dice lead to that, I've just set the odds lower than I could have. It is only if someone where to start out an encounter going for a higher difficulty and then swap over to lower difficulty somewhere mid process... which nobody but people going "that'd be dumb and that's why the way you play the game is objectively bad" are actually talking about doing.

So now you should be able to recognize that negatively charged language like "bail out", "lobotomy", "cheating", and "defy logic" is not just you stating your own opinion, but you taking the extra step to denigrate someone's opinion on the grounds of being different from yours, which doesn't even help you to do because it makes it seem like you don't even have enough faith in your own opinion to rely on its strengths to show its strengths and have to instead trash talk the "competition."

And one last thing; Even when it comes to the way you are used to playing, at some point the GM eases up instead of going as hard as they actually could to kill PCs. That's an inherent truth to the way the game works because the GM can set up literally every bit of the encounter parameters so they have every advantage and numbers to overcome the randomness of the d20. Thus every time a PC survives an encounter it is the direct result of the GM having made some choice at some point of the process that was in effect "that will be hard enough". The line you imagine that separates the GM at your table (whether it is you or not) from other GMs doing that (by allegedly defying logic even though the logic is literally the same; this will make the game fun for my players) is so arbitrary as to not actually meaningfully exist.

Instantly excusing them without questioning why there aren't really any real errata done in such a big timeframe is not doing anyone any good.

It's not "instantly excusing them", it's questioning what actually could reasonably have been done in the time and understanding it's not the thing you over-hyped yourself (like many others have) into believing was reasonable when it genuinely wasn't.

You're effectively trying to have it both ways by saying that you understand things can't be fixed right away and then throwing that out because what you were hoping gets fixed didn't get fixed yet.

And throwing the implication that because you haven't been informed of what is being worked on and when it's being worked on into the mix just makes the whole "they're not doing enough" claim even more obviously unreasonable - at least to everyone that isn't stuck in the cognitive dissonance pit of proving their expectations were actually totally reasonable by saying things like "real errata" to imply that the errata we do have don't actually count.

Sadly I have to agree that more and more content that comes out is riddled with errors, mistakes, and things that slip through the cracks way more than what it used to be beforehand.

Which is also why the lattest round of Errata was such a dissapointment since it failed to address countless things pointed in the dedicated thread for it and instead had some barebones trivial changes.

This, I feel, is a point on which many people fail to set proper expectations and do not realize it.

The Remaster cramming extra work into the same amount of time is the likely culprit for why the level of errors present in products has gone up, and while the Remaster is "done" now so the schedule can return to some normalcy there is now the extra work of finding all the errors and deciding what to actually do about them.

And while people might think fixing a lot of the errors is just reading the thread where message board users have collected what they've found and doing what the posters suggest as a fix, that's not how things really work. The team can't just go "okay, sounds good" to some armchair game designer, they have a responsibility to everyone else playing the game to actually check things out. Which is a fundamental thing, really, the people posting disappointment about how the thread didn't have a different impact were thinking it was going to be a thing it was never going to be since any errata suggestion is always going to be a thing that the team adds to the list of stuff to check in on and nothing further than that.

And there's only so many hours in the day, so the work pace isn't going to magically increase just because people hope this time the errata list will be 5 times bigger than last time.

Here is a good question though, Does a Mythic Character gain the Mythic Trait? and if not, despite all this natural language presenting them as characters in a mythic campaign, are they truly considered mythic in gamesense?

So... that's just not at all how this game works.

Because it is written in and intended to be read in casual language, it must be enough that the section of the book which describes how a PC obtains their mythic calling, feats, and the like, is titled "Mythic Characters" and that means having any of those things is a result of and proof of your being a mythic character.

Otherwise there is no such thing as a mythic character when it comes to PCs because there's no part of the text that says to add the mythic trait to your character or otherwise defines what a mythic character even is. And just about every mythic rule mentions mythic characters as though that's what you must be if you're engaging this rule, with phrasing such as "At 1st level, or whenever they receive their mythic power, a mythic character gains a mythic Calling and the Rewrite Fate ability (see page 78)." where you can see that either you are a mythic character just because the rules are in play despite not having explicitly added a trait or the rules are not actually functional even at their base level.

I think following the game conventions the other way around produces a more workable result; Mythic Resistance is clear but causes problems so we don't stick to the wording, and by doing that we make Mythic Strike also able to be functional.

That way we aren't effectively just deleting one thing even though that is, technically, simpler.

Downing PCs is not so GM dependent, but finishing PCs is highly GM dependent. How aggressively enemies target downed players is entirely up to the DM, and players die with much more regularity if so targeted. It's not odd you'd see a lot of variance.

That's the exact reason the majority of deaths seen in campaigns my group has played have been the result of afflictions and persistent damage.

I don't target downed PCs at all, and even try to avoid overlapping area damage on them if there's anything else it can make sense for an enemy to do.

I even take it further than most GMs that avoid targeting downed PCs do and have enemies attack every character that has chosen to be on the front lines (and any ranged attackers receive range attacks from any un-engaged opponents) rather than fully focusing fire.

Because I find that I hit the goal I am aiming for when I GM, so I make sure I am never aiming to get as many PCs down as possible because I'd end up with constant PC deaths if I were.

There is a counterpoint to this in that they absolutely intended for parties where only some PCs are mythic as seen in the Mixed Play Variant Rule

If that were a genuine intention and not a "I dunno, maybe you'd do this" half-mention that doesn't even cover all the ins and outs of what it mentions... it would be in the book itself, not the random extra PDF.

I don't like the way that Mythic Resistance functions as written because it only functions if the GM is using Mythic for enemies but not also using Mythic for PCs.

So since I believe that not to be intended, as Mythic rules are presented as a game-wide toggle, I have to believe that the wording of "non-mythic creatures" is actually intended to be something else.

I've picked "non-mythic Strikes" as a thing to fill in. And in doing so have made it so that the typical play case of an enemy with Mythic Resistance is that they reduce damage of the characters fighting against them which gets overcome if the character has a mythic weapon (which they usually won't because of item level... because these rules are fairly poorly constructed in more than just this one place), or has used one of the available options to get Mythic Proficiency on the Strike they are making - but then doesn't also apply against spells which are already having enough trouble when they have to go up against Mythic Resilience so they don't need to also have Mythic Resistance affect them.

It is when too many characters die farther along the story or in a place where it is really hard to introduce the super random weird characters my players like to make that the story tends to go flat and everyone decides they want to abandon the campaign.

And even when it's not a problem for the story to introduce a new character of the appropriate level, the player may look at the prospect of making all those build choices all at once and feel like they'd rather just not.

Especially because diving into a character build you haven't already gotten used to at a higher level means you're more likely to make mistakes or forget features and that means you're more likely to end up with another dead character while you're still working on figuring out how best to play this one.

I know I have had that happen, and seen it happen for others through the years, where it's not "I don't want to continue this campaign" but "I don't want to make another character" that is the obstacle to a player proceeding forward. Which thankfully modern game systems have helped out by removing the old penalties like hard limits on how many times you can be raised or reducing your level as a result of dying so all it takes is saying yes to access to resurrect to keep someone able to play (though that still has the death-spiral causing 1 week debuff that can stick a campaign in the position of being "we don't have a week, so death spiral time it is" or "we take a week and that doesn't affect anything significantly so it's basically just like if there wasn't a debuff to wait out in the first place").

My own thoughts on the likelihood of death in a game are basically that it should have an inverse relationship to the degree of time and effort it takes for a player to make another character.

Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not?

It depends on whether or not you had the opportunity to know what to prepare for or not.

Many campaigns operate under the assumption that players functionally can't know what to expect, especially at tables run by GMs with a worry about "meta-gaming" because they can turn even the most obvious kind of information into something a character has to pass a check to actually know even if it's just "there's probably spiders in The Spider Wood, and since we're traveling through The Spider Wood, we should prepare for spiders" in nature. So even level of preparedness can come down to random chance intersection of what you are prepared for and what the GM picked.

So it takes a lot of accurate hinting and meaningful options to respond to that hinting to even arrive at an encounter that isn't "the players were unaware this was to be their opponent." in nature, and that's the thing that is basically mandatory in order for a death to not be "random."

Without using any incorrectly tuned monsters, you can still defeat the PCs if you build an encounter to attack a weakness or set the fight in terrain that doesn't favour them. The point is that you always need to be aware when building encounters and that building a "too hard" encounter can happen at any level.

There's still a massive and very important difference between the awareness you're talking about coming from "I have read the material" rather than from "I have read the material, and also figured out where said material was actually leading me astray".

The whole point of the authors even bothering to write guidance on how to build encounters is so that people can just read that and have things work out as intended.

Pretending "well, we could just figure it out for ourselves even if that doesn't work" means anything other than that failed design can be fixed is nonsense. You may as well follow that reasoning all the way and just make the whole game up yourself instead of paying someone else for a product you don't even expect them to have made function for you.

We know, because they told us.

Alright, so... who said, and if possible quote them for me, anything even remotely similar to that they made the changes they made for people with no interest in the class.

Because that's the spin people that don't like the changes have chosen to put on it.

The changes are VASTLY less popular with people who were playing Oracles at the time they landed than they are with people who weren't doing that.

There's a very important distinction you're glossing over in there; why the people that were not playing the class had chosen not to play it (or to stop playing).

You're presenting it as if people that were playing the class, whether because they felt it didn't have any meaningful problems or because they were choosing to tough them out despite how meaningful they viewed the problems as being, are innately more important than any people that counted problems as significant enough to talk them out of playing the class despite their interest in it. And then presenting anyone choosing not to play the class before the changes as if they were not at all interested in it.

Kind of like if you were to say that someone's not actually worth trying to please with Sorcerer changes if they were actually playing a Fighter at the time of the updates. It's not actually logical, and it isn't actually helping your point look well formed.

The game still hides high threat creatures at the same CR as easy creatures - lesser deaths anyone? So the GM should always be aware of what makes an encounter go from challenging to deadly, what kinds of threats are easier or harder for their party, and when to give the party an opening to run versus finishing them all off.

Yes, it does. And also yes, that was a bad choice on the part of the designers.

There is no upside for their having chosen to make it so that we don't just have things which are accurately labeled and things which are errors awaiting errata, we also have things that are just plain "wrong" on purpose. There is, however, the downside that now we all have to always second guess whether something is an error awaiting errata or an intentional deviation - also known as not being able to trust the designers to design correctly.

Just because the beginner box came out well after the game doesn't mean you shouldn't have a separate teaching tool

Having two teaching tools is not what I was arguing against.

What I was arguing against was the implication that the Beginner Box should be the only thing considered a teaching tool and anything else, even the core products for the game, defaulting to exempt from criticism of the "not great to learn the game from this" sort.

Did they ever clarify if Oracles are supposed to get 4 spells known per rank? Cuz I saw something suggesting that was the case for PFS and was seriously unsure what the divine sorcerer had going for it if that's intended.

Yes. The FAQ has an errata mention for the discrepancy between the text and the table which says the table is correct.

What the divine sorcerer options are supposed to have going for them are blood magic and other sorcerer-specific things.

Having played a Life Oracle in PFS I can state by experience that it had no impact on the parties tactics.

A 10-foot aura of Concealment/difficult terrain can be annoying but it's hardly a reason to consider the Oracle has to be "handled" by the party.

You're basically arguing semantics here.

When other people say "handled" they are talking about the same things you are when you say "can be annoying". The difference is not that you know how things were and the people that don't agree with you don't know, it's that you think the situation we're all accurately aware of was fine and other people don't.

There doesn't have to be some insurmountable level of difficulty in making an oracle work well in order for someone to be unhappy with the feeling that oracle takes extra effort and, because it'd be unbalanced otherwise, doesn't really get extra cool stuff compared to "I could just play a sorcerer" or "I could just play a cleric."

It is the job of Entry level scenarios like the Beginner Box to teach the game mechanics to new players. Not the job of Player Core.

That's not actually a fair claim.

If, and only if, Paizo had intentionally set up the situation so that the Beginner Box were available before the core of the game and actually had it be the basic rules of the game to then be expanded upon with other products (rather than being a one-off product featuring alternate rules that don't actually match the rest of the game) would it be reasonable to expect the Beginner Box to be carrying the weight of expectation of teaching the game to people.

In reality, though, people were playing PF2 for almost a year and a half before the Beginner Box even came out. So if the core rulebook weren't supposed to be showing people how to play the game there was literally nothing supposed to be doing that job for over a year - which is clearly nonsense.

You mean that the GM has less things to learn. Because it's a question of experience, not something you can't control ever.

It's not about fewer things to learn as a GM, it's about what it actually means if one of the things the GM needs to learn is when the game itself cannot be trusted.

That is what makes consistency a key thing. If things are consistent then they can actually be learned - meaning what was true in a previous case can be assumed to be true of a future similar case and that assumption not prove to be wrong. Without consistency, it's less learning how things work and more guessing whether or not one case is like another case or is not.

And this is actually a thing you can measure the effect of by looking at people that play in situations where their rules are less consistent in how they work out, whether it's because their GM is regularly altering things purposely to tinker with them, or that they play with multiple GMs that have noteable "table variance" differences. The more inconsistency a person sees in the play experience the more they will feel the need to ask how something works, even if it is something they've done repeatedly over numerous sessions, instead of feeling able to trust that they already know how it works.

But I'm also not sure how good "the changes were made for people who hated the class" actually is as a practical goal.

This is unuseful spin specifically spun in order to try and present an attempt to make a class work better for a group of players that happens to not include one's self as having been motivated by idiocy and thus label it as both inherently and obviously bad.

That's not what happened with the oracle. What did happen is that a class which a lot of people found appealing but struggled to actually make use of as a direct result of its design got a revision that makes it far easier for them to work with.

It's not the "Paizo changed it for people that never had any interest in playing the class" people that liked the prior version better than the newer version want to pretend it was. And presenting it as if it were has no upside - Paizo isn't going to look at someone mischaracterizing their intentions to improve a class and go "ah man, we should be listening to what this person thinks, their inability to even give us the benefit of the doubt is a clear indicator they know what's what."

You are an adult with strong experience in board and ttrp games.

There's also something they are glossing over in their bringing up of board games in this discussion; Board Games, especially the more complex ones, almost always make a concerted effort to be approachable.

Rather than just organizing the book in the order that rules might make themselves relevant, there's a section at the front - if not a separate pamphlet or the like - which explicitly says "Hey new person, start here and do this." with the intention being that someone could crack open the box and actually be enjoying the product on a whim in an afternoon.

The exact opposite of the presented attitude of not thinking anything needs to be done to help on-board new players because the ones that are 'actually interested' will tough out or laugh off the learning curve, rather than give up on a game they'd otherwise love because their initial experience seemed to indicate it wasn't for them and nothing the game said seemed to say any different.