So I'm a bit stumped after reviewing the new APG classes. I like them and I think that they touch on some neat fluff ideas, but I have one major qualm with them: I don't know what the Paizo team is trying to accomplish with these classes.
For example, I can't say for sure if the Summoner is broken because I don't know what the objective was for giving it the eidolon. Were they trying to make a class that could give a small party a boost? What were they trying to accomplish with the inclusion of each class' features?
I don't really know how to critique these really nice classes, because I don't have any context for them.
Would it be possible to get a short objective from someone on the design team? Or perhaps give future play test products a small objective from the designers so that I (and anyone else) can give a better weigh in on each class given specific contexts or archetypes?
So I'm a bit stumped after reviewing the new APG classes. I like them and I think that they touch on some neat fluff ideas, but I have one major qualm with them: I don't know what the Paizo team is trying to accomplish with these classes.
My guess is "To give us more really cool options, touch upon some archetypes the game doesn't support too well, fill some gaps, and be generally awesome".
For example, I can't say for sure if the Summoner is broken because I don't know what the objective was for giving it the eidolon. Were they trying to make a class that could give a small party a boost? What were they trying to accomplish with the inclusion of each class' features?
Actually, intent is irrelevant when you consider if something is broken (i.e. either overpowered or underpowered). If something's too strong, it's too strong, no matter why you did it that way.
On the other hand, their original intent plays some small part in whether a class does what it's supposed to do. But I find it's more important that the class allows me to what I set out to do.
I think the summoner is supposed to offer you a class that really focusses on a "pet" - and one that is highly customisable and thus can be used for many, many concepts that rely on a pet. Plus, as the name suggests, it's supposed to be good at summoning critters.
Would it be possible to get a short objective from someone on the design team?
I'm not on the design team, but the way I see the classes, they're supposed to be the following:
Creative Director
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One thing that we assume: Not every game is played the same way.
The summoner, for example, is a GREAT class for a solo player to play, since it gives him two characters to control. The bard, on the other hand, is NOT a great class for solo play because so many of his powers depend on allies.
In a group with a lot of players, the reverse is true; bards are GREAT and summoners are clutter.
All sorts of other situations exist. No single class is good at everything.
With the new base classes, we're trying to give more options and to try out some new rules and ways to play the game is all.
Balancing every class to be equally useful in every situation is pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of the type of game Pathfinder is.
But without any idea of what classes are intended to do well or do poorly, the playtesting often flounders.
A Man In Black said it better, me thinks.
Balancing every class to be equally useful in every situation is pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of the type of game Pathfinder is.
I can appreciate this, and I don't want to sound hostile, but I was looking for something to the tune of what you said about the summoner being good in solo play.
Making a statement off the bat saying something like "we wanted the summoner to be good for solo or small group play" is a design intention someone can really test out. Or if the intention was to come up with some great alternate archetypes thats cool too, I'm just looking for some input from the designers.
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Creative Director
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Making a statement off the bat saying something like "we wanted the summoner to be good for solo or small group play" is a design intention someone can really test out. Or if the intention was to come up with some great alternate archetypes thats cool too, I'm just looking for some input from the designers.
To be honest, you'd have to ask Jason to get an accurate answer as to the summoner's design goal. He designed that class.
I can speak to the alchemist, though, since I designed that one. And it's role was to fill the niche of a magic-using class that's analogous to the rogue in that the majority of its skills are focused on that character with very little support abilities. And to design a class that's focused on using splash weapons. And to design a class that fills a classic niche that wasn't already filled by a class (the mad scientist/Dr. Jekyll role).
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Creative Director
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A class whose spell list consists almost entirely of buffs is clutter in a large group? Summoners do really well in large groups because they can specialize their eidolons even more, and always have lots of appropriate targets for their buffs. That's not necessarily exciting, but it is effective.
There's no clear design goals by which to evaluate the classes. Now, if you give design goals, some certain percentage of people are going to judge the goals and not the class's ability to meet those goals, that's inevitable noise. But without any idea of what classes are intended to do well or do poorly, the playtesting often flounders.
It's clutter in a large group because it complicates the turn flow. One PC gets to dominate every round by taking actions for himself, his eidolon, and his summoned monsters, thereby reducing the amount of time the other players at the table get to play in the session. In a medium or small group, this is a negligible problem, but in a group of 8 or more players, it rapidly gets to be annoying.
In any event, you're overestimating the role of the playtester to an extent. We are NOT looking for design partners with a playtest. We just want folks to play the classes and tell us if they were fun or if they weren't, and to support their opinions with examples cited from actual play. We've got a LOT of brilliant game designers at Paizo. We don't have a lot of time to playtest. We can thus handle the majority of the worries at the design end in house; what we're looking for is feedback on how the classes play.
You don't need to know how a car works or how to build it more efficiently to enjoy a drive in the countryside. Likewise, you don't need to know how a game is built or be a designer to enjoy playing the game.
That's the Paizo I put my faith in during the Beta playtest, and the Paizo that I hope always remains :(
I don't even slightly think he was saying that our input isn't important, just that what their looking for isn't neccesarily for you to heavily house rule a class, go play that and tell everyone how much better it was, etc.
They want you to give your opinions, report how everything does and doesn't work, etc. Its not nearly as useful, if at all, for you to tell them how to do it.
At least that's what I'd say he was saying.
If they didn't want our imput, they wouldn't do a playtest, nobody invites that kind of headache for kicks and giggles!
I can speak to the alchemist, though, since I designed that one. And it's role was to fill the niche of a magic-using class that's analogous to the rogue in that the majority of its skills are focused on that character with very little support abilities. And to design a class that's focused on using splash weapons. And to design a class that fills a classic niche that wasn't already filled by a class (the mad scientist/Dr. Jekyll role).
This is the kind of write up I was hoping to see. When I was telling my significant other about the classes in the playtest she thought the Alchemist was the going to be like the Full Metal Alchemist. However when she read through the class she didn't at all know what she was looking at and was kinda put off.
After I read her what you said about the Alchemist it was like she had an epiphany and understood how it all came together. But before that she was not to sure how it was intended to be 'played' or 'conceptualized'.
I do need to know that a car is intended for driving in the countryside, and not making intercontinental flights or taking a cruise around the lake.
I'm not saying that Paizo needs to do a whole anatomy of each design decision (although that would be terribly interesting), just give a better articulation of the goals. The alchemist, witch, summoner, and cavalier in particular suffer from this problem of "What exactly is it that this class is intended to do well? And do poorly?"
This.
Speaking as a programmer, I can say that I view the playtest more like beta software testing.
When I hand something off for usability testing, I don't want to pre-dispose the tester toward how I expect the program to be used. I want them to each try to use it in the way that comes most naturally for them.. then tell me what it was like. From that, I can tell that something about the program either works well or works badly for one of the uses. I do not want ot expect them to tell me "I took a class in programming and I think you should have done it this way...". That's not usability testing; that's a peer review.
Similarly in this playtest, James has said he thinks the Summoner can be a problem in larger groups, and a boost to solo or small groups. Even that much kind of spoils the testers objectivity, because now they know "what is expected" to be found.. the "right answer" to the question of "how does it play".
Of greater interest to Paizo, I think, would be getting unbiased results that either confirm or contradict the expected results. If the majority of the responses came back "Wow, the Summoner works great solo and can really rock in a big group", that is much more useful than "As expected, the Summoner sucks up time in big groups.. though it was kind of fun to play... maybe?". That's the kind of response you get from someone whose experience is not what is expected, and is now afraid to say so.
On a different front, there are also a number of people who would resent being told "how to play". Quite a few people just want to be able to put together levels of classes in new and interesting ways, regardless of the "intended" use.
I guess then it depends on how one thinks of a playtest. To use your example, I see it more like a peer review. But you do make some valid points about it needing to be, for the paizo crew at least, more like usability testing.
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Creative Director
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No offense intended James, but that certainly seems to be a shift in the attitude from what I remember during the Beta playtest.
Sure you have several brilliant game designers, but I was always under the impression the point of having a massive playtest was to catch the mistakes the designers made, to fix the holes in the mechanics, to improve things that are too weak, to tone down things that are too strong, to make the mechanics do what the flavor text says they can do.
If I wanted to just play a game and say whether it was fun or not I could go to any company and sit down and play a session and write 'fun' or 'not fun' on a survey card.
That isn't what Paizo's playtests seemed to be about. It always seemed to me that you guys cared about our input, about how we could help build and shape the outcome of the game.
That's the Paizo I put my faith in during the Beta playtest, and the Paizo that I hope always remains :(
The point of a playtest IS to catch mistakes that we didn't anticipate or didn't catch. And the playtest procedure we're following for the APG is going pretty much EXACTLY the way it did with the Beta. Nothing Has Changed.
Playtest the game for us. Tell us what happened. That's what we want. We care about input... but when posts to us come off as condescending, antagonistic, or the like (even if the author didn't intend that), we can get defensive.
It's possible I'm overreacting here and there and getting frustrated that what I'm seeing isn't playtest feedback from actual gaming sessions but analytical feedback from just reading the rules. In any event, it's not helping, so I guess I'll step out of the thread.
James, I prefer the staff to remain pretty much silent in the playtest forums, with the exception of announcements of actual changes to the playtest material. Everyone loves hearing from the staff, especially to have their own ideas discussed, but that's what RPG Superstar is for.
Several of the best ideas in the Beta were from discussions where we didn't even hear an official voice at all, but Jason (I presume) was there watching. We didn't waste any time trying to get his attention, rather we spent that time discussing the pros and cons of our idea — and how we were using it in the playtest. The only feedback we got was when the idea ended up in the final version.
So maybe you should step out of the playtest forums for a bit, and let people just state their case and presume it is being accounted for. Some folks will piss and moan about not getting feedback, but the playtest isn't about the staff giving the playtesters feedback, that's backwards.
In the end, you will publish a book. People who got their ideas into the book will do a dance, people with huge egos were never going to like it anyway, and the world will continue to turn.
I don't know but i play the game cause i find it enjoyable, not because I can build a character that can crush dragons or use ogre arms as a club. To me this play test has been, play the character and tell us what is awesome, broken, balanced, and just plain sucks. You don't need to know what they designed it for to play a class.
When i built an oracle i was like, holy crap a wandering shaman who encases himself in bone armor and casts necromantic spells, that only speaks in tongues when he is aggravated or tense, and wields a scythe.
Now imho, the bones oracle is great to roleplay with if you have an actual cleric in the group wanting to be healer.
Armor of bones(i know they already states they were looking at improving this) is really no better than leather armor and doesn't even stack leaving you in melee with crappy armor.
Voice from the grave is not only useful, but just plain awesome for getting information from someone that decided to slit his own throat so you couldn't question him.
And the fact that i can start at lvl 1 with doom and bane as spells known and just cast which ever i want 3 times / day is great for helping the group in combat.
That all being said, lets just get back to providing actual playtest data instead of just saying, this is how i would change the class cause really that is never what they asked for.
I feel like this is getting out of hand, my post originally was about asking for some direction with the classes on behalf of my significant other (a play tester of the APG classes) for our Ptolus game.
It was not meant to be antagonistic, damning, dissolutioning, or negative. I'm really sorry if it ended seeming like this.
I really like Paizo and Pathfinder and all the things they are doing. You guys do a great job. I just see areas that I would like more, and by all rights you can say no. I just wanted to get my case out there and see too if others wanted something similar.
I didn't want to come off as being like "Paizo, you need to tell people what to do" I was just looking for a little initial direction because there was some discrepancy in vision between the designer and the play tester which resulted in no play testing for that class but for a different one (in this case the inquisitor).
I still would like to ask for a little initial direction for the classes somewhere in the final product. But it wouldn't be bad at all if you didn't go that route. It would just be nice there for people who WANT it (or even NEED it) and people who don't want it can just ignore it.
I apologize if I'm over stepping my bounds as a play tester : P