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It really emphasizes the instability of high level play--the way that it's all about rock/scissors/paper and you die if you guess wrong or miss a rule somewhere. That's the least fun part of the game for me.
This is why the weakness of every character in at least one category of saving throws becomes a huge factor in high-level play - every encounter is potentially a rock/scissors/paper event for at least one member of the party due. The prevalence of save or die effects at high levels simply exacerbates this problem.
As long as the solution doesn't involve front-loading everything then making completely homogenized scaling for the rest of the levels, I'll be pretty happy.
Some of the SoD's getting removed help this a bit even though I'm sad to see them go, and at least some kind of an attempt to avoid multiple statboosters on every character helps.
I've played in a game where a handful of select PrC's, spells, feat combinations, and items (statboosters) were removed from the game and the EL encounters lowered a bit. I don't remember what all was removed but it really did make a solid difference at the higher levels. Perhaps I can get ahold of my buddy who ran it and post his changes...it wasn't perfect but he put alot of thought into the higher levels.
that is just a ex. alot of the problems ppl have posted is about players using all these way to break the game, a good dm can stop them from using them to ruin a plot, that was the point i was making that there are easy ways to stop your players from controlling the game, but it does take some experience DMing, non experienced DMs really shouldnt try to run high lvl games, sorry that is a fact no nerfing of high lvl play will change.
I ran AoW with the book rules and RotRL with a cut down spell selection (losing fly, teleport, and all spells of that type, divination, commune, and all high-level spells of that type, and a couple of others).
So from my personal experience I have to disagree with you completely. Those changes made the game significantly more fun for me to run, and according to the player, significantly more fun for him to play. They are drastic, and I'm not pushing them as general rules, but for us cutting the PCs' capabilities had a number of very positive effects. I particularly liked the increase sense of place that came from losing fly and teleport.
As a player I would beg for these changes--we are using most of them in CotCT, and the reappearance of short-range teleports is at the GM's request, not mine.
I'm a middling experienced GM--about 30 years--and I'm familiar with a lot of tricks for hurting high level parties, but the game starts to become very strained and adversarial if I have to use them all the time. It becomes an arms race between player and GM, which is not what either of us want. And for me personally, the line between having the PCs cut through everything effortlessly (the last parts of AoW for us) and having the PCs die like flies (the last parts of SCAP) is so thin, there may be *nothing* in between.
Mary
Four ranges are enough: personal, touch, short, long. Players can probably remember that much for every spell their PCs have, and then they won't have to look up ranges. Also, there's no pressing reason to make the ranges level-dependent. Personal, touch, 20', 200'--or something of that sort--you can memorize once and never look it up again.
Five durations are probably enough as well: instant, rounds, minutes, hours, permanent. Again, the level dependency is a lot of work for its limited entertainment value, and it makes some spells useless at the level you first get them. Instant, 6 rounds, 6 minutes, 6 hours, permanent. Or something like that--details are less important than avoiding the constant look-ups.
I like these suggestions a lot, particularly where ranges are concerned. For the durations, one of the suggestions I made earlier was to round short duration spells off to cover the length of a single encounter. While this would make some lower-level spells more potent, if You combine this with limiting the number of buffs (see my method earlier in this thread) then that would help to balance things out.
As for areas, perhaps they could be constrained to those that are found in the Steel Sqwire spell templates that Paizo carries.
One of the pros of 4th ed is its alot more streamlined for the DM. I think I would replace the shapechange rules in the Pathfinder Chronicles with Form of the Wolf type spells rather than what Paizo has done.
More teleport spells would be nice as well but maybe as short range tactical teleports with a max range of a few miles for the higher level ones (1 mile per level?) or a long casting time for the uber long range ones (continental) or an easy way to construct teleport gates/portals if you need to get from A to B in a hurry but want to control where the PCs go.
Metamagic is also dangerous. Does anyone remember the old thread at the WoTC board detaiing the biggest abusable spells?
More teleport spells would be nice as well but maybe as short range tactical teleports with a max range of a few miles for the higher level ones (1 mile per level?) or a long casting time for the uber long range ones (continental) or an easy way to construct teleport gates/portals if you need to get from A to B in a hurry but want to control where the PCs go.
Teleport portals are nice. You get the ability to set adventures in exotic far-off locales, without the insane flexibility that makes adventure preparation so difficult, and without scry/buff/teleport problems.
I used them in RotRL--modeled after the gate that allows access to Runeforge--and was fairly pleased. (We didn't otherwise have teleport, and it seemed logically necessary to have *some* way for the villains to have gotten where they had. I can't believe Xin-Shalast would exist as described without some form of teleport. No one is going to take the stairs!)
Mary
Creative Director
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I can't believe Xin-Shalast would exist as described without some form of teleport. No one is going to take the stairs!
You're probably right, although I disagree that "no one took the stairs." They wouldn't have built them if there wasn't a demand.
That said, Thassilon was a MUCH higher magic nation than anything currently in existence in the Inner Sea Region. I assure you that there were plenty of teleports, shadow walkers, and wind walkers in effect in that day.
Mary, what sort of mechanics did You use for the teleporters? Specifically, the spells, materials and number of casters/caster-levels required. I'm hoping to start a new campaign once the Beta comes out and the campaign idea I have would be well-served by such devices. I'd rather not have to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already worked this out. :)
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Hmmm...some interesting ideas here.
Perhaps the casting time for both Teleport and Greater Teleport should be linked to the caster's level of familiarity with the destination?
How about something like this:
Familiarity Casting Time
-----------------------------------------
Very familiar 1 Standard Action
Studied carefully 1 Round
Seen casually 1 Minute
Viewed once 5 Minutes
This would limit some of the more abusive uses of these spells.
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Mary, what sort of mechanics did You use for the teleporters? Specifically, the spells, materials and number of casters/caster-levels required. I'm hoping to start a new campaign once the Beta comes out and the campaign idea I have would be well-served by such devices. I'd rather not have to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already worked this out. :)
I'm not Mary, but I'll give my thoughts:
1) Only caster himself transports with the 5th level Teleport. (perhaps higher level spell - maybe 9th is Mass teleport - seems the Mass spells are 4 levels higher....).
2) Teleporter must have visited the location once before and marked it with a 'ritual' (ceremony, wizard mark, magic circle - whatever - something to indicate that the caster has "prepared" that spot as a receptor to his spell).
NOTE: #2 may cause power drops in most of the powerful fiends.
Robert
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Or you could just say that a teleport automatically dispels all harmless magic. In other words, a teleport spell ends all buff spells.
Thats on to something. A little too much on the deux ex-machina of the DM, I think, but has potential.
Instead of just that fiat that "no buffs transfer" it could be that the spell takes 24 hours to complete (the characters are all in a stasis for that time) and everyone (if you're keeping the spell able to transport multiple people) cannot be casting a bunch of spells while doing it.
Those with TP as spell like abilities such as Fiends dont need to do the 24 hour stasis as it's "natural"
For the record, I'm just giving out ideas to help many others: for my part, I've never had a group of players that did the scry/buff/teleport schtick. I'm sure my long-time veterans of my games know that they wouldn't get away with such shenanigans and so they don't even bother trying. The game is about having fun - that doesn't sound like fun to me - or to them i'm sure - so why bother.
Robert
2) Teleporter must have visited the location once before and marked it with a 'ritual' (ceremony, wizard mark, magic circle - whatever - something to indicate that the caster has "prepared" that spot as a receptor to his spell).
In my homebrew campaign, most long-distance teleports and plane shifting are via Zelazny-style Trumps, requiring a feat (Trump Artistry). This has reduced a lot of abuse to a minimum. Barring that, you can teleport to a place you're currently scrying, but there's a failure chance associated with that. We've eliminated wind walk, ruled that etherealness runs the risk of ethereal encounters, embraced the Fly skill (and require checks to fly through dungeon corridors without crashing into walls when going around turns), nerfed find the path, etc.
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Modifying teleport to curb some of the current abuses is not as easy as it looks. On the one hand, most people agree that the scry-buff-teleport trick is undesirable. But on the other hand, teleportation is a staple of fantasy fiction and it needs to 'feel right' in the context of the genre.
One problem is that there is no easy way for high-level NPCs to secure sensitive locations against enemy scrying and teleportation - most of the spells that block divination spells are either ridiculously high level or have significant limitations (duration, area of effect, etc).
And there are very few spells that can effectively seal an area against enemy teleportation. The one exception is Forbiddance, but not every villain is going to have a high-level cleric on their staff to cast this for them. Forbiddance is permanent and has a casting time of 6 rounds. It might be better to introduce a slightly lower-level Teleport Shield spell that lasts for 1 day per level of the caster, but which can be cast in a single round. And this spell should be available to arcane casters as well as divine ones...
Whether as a player or a DM, I don't remember having a worthy villian who would be easily scryed on; if they could be scryed on, there was a good reason why it would be suicide to buff and teleport in (being surrounded by powerful henchman or guardians, for example). When we have done the "buff/teleport" (no scry) combination is when we knew the general location of the villian we were after; sometimes we were dead on and could finish the encounter right away, or we had move to a nearby location to find him or her (or it), sometimes with some of the "buffs" wearing off.
My general viewpoint comes down to a DM knowing his party. If the DM knows the PCs have the power to successfully "scry/buff/teleport" then the DM should have the expectation that the final battle (or other battles) may be too easy. Of course, I have played in many campaigns were the "buffing" the party before the battle was merely a strategy used to improve our chances of winning (or sometimes our only chance!). This kind of party planning should not be viewed as something that is broken or abused, but a part of a good ambush. DMs should always consider turning the tables on the players if the DM has a particular cunning or powerful villian...doesn't it make for a better game if the players are surprised or ambushed sometimes? If the villian is truly a worthy opponent for the PCs then something as simple as "scry/buff/teleport" should not be enough to make that final battle "easy".
I do remember being a part of a "scry/buff/teleport" encounter against a powerful demon. We had fought this demon several times; each time we hurt him just bad that he would teleport away before he went down or we had to teleport away because we were losing horribly. We could not defeat him by simply going into some dungeon and walking into his lair. He was too smart for that. The fact is that he had what we wanted so we had to defeat him directly in order to get it. The only way we could defeat the demon was to scry on him, buff, and teleport in. After we were in, the wizard (who was me) had to cast dimensional anchor so our demon friend wouldn't just teleport out when he was almost dead. This was the only way we could beat him. Our frustration with this villain led him to one of the most memorable and satisfying to defeat. Our "scry/buff/teleport" approach did not take away from the encounter but made it possible for us to be victorious.
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If you want to be less arbitrary, you could say that teleport ends anything dispel magic could end, harmless or otherwise. That stops scry-buff-teleport and it speeds up the tedious teleport-regroup-return process by automatically taking care of the inevitable "dispel all harmful effects" stage of regrouping.Thats on to something. A little too much on the deux ex-machina of the DM, I think, but has potential.
Or you could just say that a teleport automatically dispels all harmless magic. In other words, a teleport spell ends all buff spells.
Now THAT I like. Alot.
Robert
At my table, we :
A.) limit the number of buffs to 1 per 4 levels. This one the players fought me on, but conceded early that it felt right. This was later adjusted to be "active" buffs, i.e. casting true strike didn't de-activate mage armor.
B.) Placed time limts on rounds in real time. I have an egg timer stuck to the back of my screen. When it's your turn, you have 2 minutes to at least have SOMETHING put together.
C.) Monster prep? Cut out custom skills. Monsters have set bonus of 25%-50% of hit die as static modifier. Using this as DA RULE, and make exceptions for BBEG or iconic encounters like dragons. Also, MAX HP every time.
D.) Being VERY picky about PrC's. Face it, 75% of PrC's are crap. Re-iterations of variations of specialized classes designed to fill pages in a book. Players who want an exotic PrC had better RP it to the hilt, and prove he wants it. This also helps weed out broken builds.
E.) Lately, I have had a lot of success using larger groups of weaker opponents. For a EL 20 party, this could conceivably be 15-20 7th level Gnoll barbarians led by a pair of 15th level priests.
Mostly, you just have to fudge, fudge, fudge. If rolling saves for 20 bad guys is tiresome, just outright kill 5 of them, and scatter the rest. Us rules lawyers have a hard time with stuff like this, but we sometimes have to remember, fair doesn't always equal fun. Especially from the players POV.
Hope this helps.
I'm in the camp of people who haven't had a lot of problems with high-level gaming since 3.0. Clearly, my DM uses many of the strategies we've discussed here (eg - short-hand monster stat-blocks, improvising low-level powers and maxxing hps, you get as much time to buff as your characters physically have (the "2-minute rule"), if you use a broken feat or spell combo be sure the DM is going to use it as well, etc.). However, even we agree that fights often drag and certain spells and abilities can make the DM's life difficult. I also think PF has already started dealing with the most infamous (ie, combat maneuvers, polymorph spell, etc.).
Some thoughts on the issues people have raised:
On the game-breaking utility spells, I think it's important that the Big-Bad-Evil-Guys are on a par with the PCs. As people have said, if the PCs have scry and teleport, the BBEGs should all regularly be shielded from scrying and teleportation, and should readily recognize when they're being scryed on. You could create low-tech ways to defeat such spells (lead, etc.), but really, if you're playing in a low-magic world, there shouldn't be that many teleporters around (meaning it's hard to get the spell, people are always asking you to teleport), and if you're playing in a high-magic world, then society should have relatively common ways (such as cheap items, laws, etc.) of dealing with these spells that would be so easily used for crime or socially inappropriate actions. Nerfing teleport to caster only is an interesting solution, but given completely equipped parties, I usually find that it takes the mage more than one teleport to get everyone anyway (which cuts into the scry/surprise factor). Portals are also a great solution.
I do think terrain needs to be kept relevant. (If anything, it's underused in our games.) So, if your high level PCs are adventuring on this plane (and not some other one that can mess with their continuing effects), then maybe some combination of high level effects either from a BBEG or from the environment itself (like the underdark's faezress) or from local legal restrictions can cut into this type of use. I mean, it would be hard for most groups to simply remove Fly, for example. Maybe that becomes a self only spell also. Or maybe you get no experience if you skip obstacles this way; the experience penalties have to be enough to have bite though.
Regarding skill checks, I actually don't think there's too much of a problem with the basic system. I realize that at medium to high levels, there are huge gaps between skills people have put ranks in an other skills, but I think this is appropriate. At low levels, the DCs you face are relatively modest and the people who put resources into skills get nice little bonuses. At higher levels, in situations with low DCs the people who focus on a skill get to just about skip out on the check altogether as a reward and the other people have to deal with the problem with potentially a modest modifier. Additionally, people who put all those resources into one skill also get the chance to do something really hard with the skill. But skills don't become irrelevant if they affect the whole party and are set at normal (not superhuman) DCs.
As for buff-spell stacking, we've never had much of a problem keeping track of bonuses, because a) we only get the time to put them on that our characters have to think about it, no half-an-hour planning; and b) because if we can't keep track of our bonuses, they go away. I agree, however, that it's a real pain to monitor multiple durations, especially for the DM. I'd probably be on board with either setting limits on the number of active buffs and/or making durations last per encounter--kind of like the limit on the number of magical tattoos you can have on yourself under various 3.0/3.5 rules. I also don't get how someone can realistically have 50 buffs on them at once, as someone mentioned. At that point, haven't half your round/level durations expired?
Iterative attacks? Never had a problem with them as long as people are awake and actually have dice ready and roll in groups. That's even after using a Master of the Unseen Hand who telekinesed 15 greatswords. Still, just to see whether it would impact our timing at all, I'd be interested to try a group rolling alternative. Someone suggested making one roll and if you're the right class/level and you hit by 5, you get double or by 10 you get triple works, but what if you want to attack multiple enemies? Maybe the player gets to divide the damage equally against the appropriate number of targets given his class/level, if he so chooses. Either way, critting should probably only double one attack per target.
I haven't DM'd enough to have a complete sense of the problems of high level campaign crafting, but for NPC creation purposes, as I said above, I wholeheartedly agree that DMs need to not plan out NPCs in the detail a player plans out a character. Use the MM stat blocks and ad lib from there. DM tips in the core book would probably be useful on these points.
At my table, we :
A.) limit the number of buffs to 1 per 4 levels. This one the players fought me on, but conceded early that it felt right. This was later adjusted to be "active" buffs, i.e. casting true strike didn't de-activate mage armor.
B.) Placed time limts on rounds in real time. I have an egg timer stuck to the back of my screen. When it's your turn, you have 2 minutes to at least have SOMETHING put together.
C.) Monster prep? Cut out custom skills. Monsters have set bonus of 25%-50% of hit die as static modifier. Using this as DA RULE, and make exceptions for BBEG or iconic encounters like dragons. Also, MAX HP every time.
D.) Being VERY picky about PrC's. Face it, 75% of PrC's are crap. Re-iterations of variations of specialized classes designed to fill pages in a book. Players who want an exotic PrC had better RP it to the hilt, and prove he wants it. This also helps weed out broken builds.
E.) Lately, I have had a lot of success using larger groups of weaker opponents. For a EL 20 party, this could conceivably be 15-20 7th level Gnoll barbarians led by a pair of 15th level priests.
Mostly, you just have to fudge, fudge, fudge. If rolling saves for 20 bad guys is tiresome, just outright kill 5 of them, and scatter the rest. Us rules lawyers have a hard time with stuff like this, but we sometimes have to remember, fair doesn't always equal fun. Especially from the players POV.
Hope this helps.
E works well. Barbarians are one of the few classes high levle PCs fear as even low level ones are capabel of hitting ACs PCs often have and they do decent damage. Barbarians are also more or less immune to area effect spells and if you use enough of them maybe buffed up they're ore or less immune to save or dies.
More DM cheese I've noticed is stuff like a single monk level on someting like a gold dragon or the vow of poverty feat on a dragon. Awakened die animals are also great because if you give them no associated class levels they often have CRs very close to a normal PC due to racial hit cie.
Eg a 14HD dire animal with a CR of 7 can have 14 wizard levels and a CR of 14 as opposed to a level 14 human wizard with 14d4 hit points. That sort of cheese though can often TPK even high level PCs though.
Hey my threat got more than 180 posts!Amazing!Still there won´t be anymore changes to the game since the Pathfinder RPG is already in Beta stage. So why arguing?
Despite that fact if Paizo want´s to make all Levels nice I frankly not understand why all there AP´s go only until the Level 15 oder 16 (exept maybe the Age of Worms and the Shakled City).
Not good Paizo.No.Still a year to go until final.But as long as they stay with there backwards mindset crap they won´t make it.I`m shure!
Still there won´t be anymore changes to the game since the Pathfinder RPG is already in Beta stage. So why arguing?
Perhaps You are thinking "Beta" in terms of a video game company releasing the finished game as a "Demo" without having any intentions on fixing the bugs or doing any fine-tuning before it comes out *cough*Unreal Tournament 3*cough*.
However, when the company running a beta-test is not totally incompetent (like Epic Games) then the Beta-Test period is used to gather playtesting and customer feedback to make mechanical corrections.
In otherwords, just because the Alpha-Testing period is over, doesn't mean that providing feedback is useless. While You could argue that doing any testing right now is irrelevant until the Beta comes out, Jason himself said that continued testing/feedback even with Alpha3 remains useful since there are some features from Alpha3 that have made it into Beta as-is.
So while providing feedback on things that have changed from Alpha3 to Beta is moot, being as we currently have no way of knowing what hasn't made it into Beta, there is still a good reason to keep on providing input.
Despite that fact if Paizo want´s to make all Levels nice I frankly not understand why all there AP´s go only until the Level 15 oder 16 (exept maybe the Age of Worms and the Shakled City).
Paizo has already stated that they are not switching the APs from 3.5 to PfRPG until after the Final PfRPG hardbound is released in 2009. Given that they have admitted that 3.5 breaks down at high-level (and want to fix this for PfRPG) why would they have made products that were designed for 3.5 before PfRPG was ever conceived of to run at levels many of their customers have expressed dissatisfaction with?
If that doesn't make sense, then let me put it this way...
One year from now, let's say Paizo claims they have fixed high-level play. Upon the release of PfRPG Final, they convert the AP line to PfRPG. ONLY THEN would it be logical and in-keeping with their mindset to release a high-level AP. If they released a high-level AP before then, then they would be releasing it as 3.5 which would mean they would willfully be releasing an adventure set at levels they deem difficult to run and that are not enjoyed as highly by their customers.
Still a year to go until final.But as long as they stay with there backwards mindset crap they won´t make it.I`m shure!
Hmm, legacy support of existing 3.5 material is suddenly a bad idea? Sounds like maybe You'd be happier playing a different RPG. I heard WotC recently released an RPG that didn't bother with any "backwards mindset crap"...
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While I admit that "fixing" high level play and keeping backwards compatability seem to be mutually exclusive, let's not write Pathfinder off yet. They may at least be able to mitigate the difficulties enough to make the occasional jaunt into high level play worthwhile. They have already made strides towards this. Let's help them make it a reality. It does sound like 4E may be more to your liking jules, although I have to say that playing 1st level characters in an into adventure seemed far more complex than 4th or 5th level 3.5 characters. This is even taking the "newness" of the rules into account. I'd hate to run a paragon or epic level 4E game at this point.
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Wow, OK, so many good ideas and thoughts. I must admit my Shackled City game ran to conclusion, which happened to be 19th level for my 5 players. While I never ran a 20+ NPC mass combat like Lisa did, I’m sure it would be quite a chore. Overall I don’t have any huge difficulties with high level play. But as someone else wrote a lot of the things can’t necessarily be fixed by design, but by advice.
If the PFRPG has a section targeting prep and tactics for high level play that would go a much longer way than stripping creatures of abilities or making sweeping changes. When I prep a high-level NPC or beastie, I print the sucker out, and make heavy use of highlighters and underlines. Target the immunities, defenses, and weak saves. Then go to the spells or spell-like abilities and look up just a handful of the highest level stuff. That’s great and favorable that the CR 25 dragon also has Read Magic or Mending but I simply ignore any lower level stuff when it comes to a knock-down fight and go straight to knowing how the big guns work. I don’t think Stat Blocks need to start stripping monsters of cool (and possibly useful) spells as 4E did, but so far I have found the very simple “Tactics” section of Paizo stat blocks of late to be a godsend in helping me target where the creature’s strength lies and what I should do with it in play.
As for stuff like fly and teleport, I get that. In 3.0 I used to get quite annoyed with this. The PCs seemed to start flying or teleporting everywhere at fairly low levels and it was a bother. But, once I used Monte Cook’s “trap teleporting characters in a transdimensional web of horrors” free WotC adventure and let them know the various ley lines of my world could play havoc with teleport dropping them off early they learned not to depend on it so much. In 3.5, the past few years, the great diversity and specific core classes like Binder, Spirit Shaman, Swashbuckler, Warlock, etc. made getting “skip the travel” spells more rare or available only at higher levels, when it made more sense.
Point in case: In my Rise of the Runelords game I have a Binder/Sorcerer, Spirit Shaman, Paladin/Knight and Ranger/Scout. They actually walked up the Storval Stairs! (Somebody tell me when we hit 22, I’m gonna throw up). Only now at 11th level can the Binder jaunt the party a couple hundred yards, and finally the Spirit Shaman could turn the whole party into birds and let them make good time back to civilization, in a flavorful way. And really, by this level in the game I’m ready to let them move around a bit more with magic. It rewards the characters who took the abilities and can still be fun.
So while I am opposed to patching the rules constantly to limit creativity, there are some things I am reading that interest me. Helping to control the multiple attacks in the high teens? Cool. Limiting the number (not type) of buff spells? Fantastic idea! And, as long as Paizo monsters and NPC’s still have their ‘tactics’ section that’s a super start.
-DM Jeff
Still there won´t be anymore changes to the game since the Pathfinder RPG is already in Beta stage. So why arguing?Perhaps You are thinking "Beta" in terms of a video game company releasing the finished game as a "Demo" without having any intentions on fixing the bugs or doing any fine-tuning before it comes out *cough*Unreal Tournament 3*cough*.
However, when the company running a beta-test is not totally incompetent (like Epic Games) then the Beta-Test period is used to gather playtesting and customer feedback to make mechanical corrections.
In otherwords, just because the Alpha-Testing period is over, doesn't mean that providing feedback is useless. While You could argue that doing any testing right now is irrelevant until the Beta comes out, Jason himself said that continued testing/feedback even with Alpha3 remains useful since there are some features from Alpha3 that have made it into Beta as-is.
So while providing feedback on things that have changed from Alpha3 to Beta is moot, being as we currently have no way of knowing what hasn't made it into Beta, there is still a good reason to keep on providing input.
Despite that fact if Paizo want´s to make all Levels nice I frankly not understand why all there AP´s go only until the Level 15 oder 16 (exept maybe the Age of Worms and the Shakled City).Paizo has already stated that they are not switching the APs from 3.5 to PfRPG until after the Final PfRPG hardbound is released in 2009. Given that they have admitted that 3.5 breaks down at high-level (and want to fix this for PfRPG) why would they have made products that were designed for 3.5 before PfRPG was ever conceived of to run at levels many of their customers have expressed dissatisfaction with?
If that doesn't make sense, then let me put it this way...
One year from now, let's say Paizo claims they have fixed high-level play. Upon the release of PfRPG Final, they convert the AP line to...
Oh boy,
no I find the pathfinder RPG quite attractive indeed (4th Edition realy sucks though).There are some nice ideas they´ve done but in terms of highlevel gameplay I do not see a real improvement.
There is only one real option to balance the game I think.A 180° jump would be necessary and you´d have change all classes and make them all equal like in the 4th Edition.I would not like that but as I see it there is no other way.
You said they would announce some day high level play is fixed.This is PR. I work in a gamepublisher in the PR Department.Trust me i know how things work in this business. In general this whole playtest is a big puplic relation event.They might add some ideas and discuss a few but in the end the ceo´s have the final word.It the last few years in the gaming industry it came trendy to have forum for all their games.The reason for that is to make players feel that they are somehow part of a community and so on.I don´t wanna go into details:)
This is not ment to be a flaming.Just a honest way as I see the things.
Nevertheless I´m very curios how Paizo will manage it in the end and I´m looking forward to the beta and final edition.
Cheers mate Jules:)