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Biology is hard, it's just applied chemistry (which in turn is just applied physics, which in turn is just applied math).
Physics and chemistry are hard science.Psychiatry & sociology are soft sciences.
(With biology somewhere in the middle.)
Nope - sorry - by the actual definition it's middling.
By definition - how hard a science is is defined by how easy it is to control experiments.
For physics & chemistry - assuming you don't screw up - every time you do an experiment the results will be virtually identical.
For biology there are too many uncontrollable variables for experiments' results to be identical. Hence it being middling between hard & soft. That's why medicines have so many potential side-effects which may or may not actually take effect. Different people vary too much for them to be sure.
(While there's some debate over where different sciences fall - biology certainly isn't AS hard as physics/chemistry.)
Aaaanyway back on topic
I don't like scatter firearms. I mean as the OP already pointed out firearms are generally wonky, but scatter is what bothers me the most. According to Ultimate combat blunderbusses and shotguns spread their shot in a 90° cone and as is that wasnt impossible enough still somehow manage to inflict damage. I could say that in reality the spread of a such a weapon is not even wide enough to reliably hit two people standing shoulder to shoulder, and really it's not even true to life realism that i'm asking for, just the fact that you can stand in the corner of a room and fill almost the entire room with shrapnel in one shot just doesn't work for me. Even other games (like shadowrun and most shooter videogames) make more sense with their albeit already ridiculous spread.
Psychiatry & sociology are soft sciences.(With biology somewhere in the middle.)
That doesn't make psychiatry & sociology untrue or somehow 'lesser'
I can think of one poster who would disagree with that.
The armchair psychology of the 1800s that Hollywood likes to portray with Freudianism, the subconscious, and that crock of goblin dung has not been psychology for about 75 years, since Skinner showed up and showed us that the behavior can be predicted and controlled almost like a perfect machine...and even he has been outmoded by Cognitive psychology, and neurology has put both of those on the shelf where they're collecting dust, despite both behavioralism and cognitive sciences having roots in scientific method. The FMRI is just so damn useful in literally seeing how people think...
The phrase "Soft Science" shows some pretty heavy ignorance of the subject matter.
Sociology, though, is just collecting data about groups and making observations about a collection. Its pretty much educated racism. There's no application of the scientific method or experimentation involved at all.
Anyway, it's not the science of psych that's soft, it's simply the fact that in order to isolate exactly what is going on in a brain you have to alter only one thing at a time and that's kind of, you know, incredibly unethical to do to someone on purpose, because it involves intentional brain damage. But if you can LOOK at the brain, as it's thinking, then you actually CAN prove something every single time and..
Huh. FMRI again. Well damn. And that duplicates results every time, does it? Well smack my butt and call me Sally, looks like even by the definition of replication, it seems like Psych is evolving through Neurology into a hard science. Someone grab your pokeballs, we've got a new creature on our hands.
But, yeah, sociology isn't a science at all. It's study, but it isn't science.
Well if you look at purity then this might apply
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You can't have math without drawing the numbers. Art!
Also, I think you greatly mischaracterize these "soft games".I didn't mean it to imply a negative connotation.
It's like with science.
Physics and chemistry are hard science.
Psychiatry & sociology are soft sciences.
(With biology somewhere in the middle.)
That doesn't make psychiatry & sociology untrue or somehow 'lesser' - just soft, in that they leave much more open to interpretation rather than having a more hard & fast rule for most everything.
It's not good or bad - just different.
And I'm saying that that's a misunderstanding of how most of these games are designed and written.
It gets considered "advice" or "fluff", but it isn't. It's actually part of the game and disregarding it is just as disruptive as say ignoring speed rules in Pathfinder, or saving throws.
Lack of numbers/math doesn't mean something isn't a rule.
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The phrase "Soft Science" shows some pretty heavy ignorance of the subject matter.
"Soft Science" doesn't mean - 'not real science' (though admittedly - some use it that way - but when they do, they're using it wrong). It's in reference to how perfectly you can replicate experiments over and over again.
Psychology experiments are going to have a lot of variation. You can bell curve it to figure out the most likely. (incredibly simplistic way of describing it) But it's not anywhere close to a perfect replication of the results of a previous experiment using the same methodology.
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And I'm saying that that's a misunderstanding of how most of these games are designed and written.It gets considered "advice" or "fluff", but it isn't. It's actually part of the game and disregarding it is just as disruptive as say ignoring speed rules in Pathfinder, or saving throws.
Lack of numbers/math doesn't mean something isn't a rule.
And you're either misreading me or straw-manning me intentionally.
They are rules. Yes. I totally agree.
But they're more subjective rules - with a lot more up to the discretion of the GM on the fly. There's nothing wrong with that - in many ways it makes the game run smoother - but it's a more subjective system. It's not better or worse - but it IS different. And certain things work better in crunchier systems, and certain work better in softer systems. That was my entire initial point. (I prefer crunchy systems myself - but I don't think that makes them better. That's just my taste.)
This is actually lack of a rule: success at a cost.
I wouldn't want to use it for everything, but I think particularly skills and certain kinds of magic could be very interesting if they included "success at a cost" mechanics. Or if it were included as GM option as a mechanic in the game (to offer the players when they fail a check).
There are "success at a cost" mechanics for some types of Pathfinder character. You can reroll a d20 roll once a day. You can add an extra d6 to a d20 roll four times a day. That kind of thing. (Not a permanent cost, but you have to ration them carefully.)
There are "success at a cost" mechanics for some types of Pathfinder character. You can reroll a d20 roll once a day. You can add an extra d6 to a d20 roll four times a day. That kind of thing. (Not a permanent cost, but you have to ration them carefully.)This is actually lack of a rule: success at a cost.
I wouldn't want to use it for everything, but I think particularly skills and certain kinds of magic could be very interesting if they included "success at a cost" mechanics. Or if it were included as GM option as a mechanic in the game (to offer the players when they fail a check).
That's not success at a cost.
The basic system is still a binary pass/fail. Success at a cost is a three-tiered (or more) method, pass/cost/fail. The middle part, cost, is what is missing from Pathfinder.
Example: You're trying to cross a dangerous rope-bridge. You roll Acrobatics.
Success: You cross without incident
Success at cost: You cross, but your pack slips open and you drop a valuable piece of gear
Failure: You can't cross, or potentially fall.
Pathfinder doesn't have a mechanic for the middle option. It's a valuable grey-area that I've found extremely useful when I GM games that do have it. I don't use it all the time, but it's really nice to have in the toolbox. I do bring it into my Pathfinder games, but this is pure GM-fiat and not a mechanic in the game.
I actually agree that there are too many binary pass/fails in Pathfinder. (This spell either ends the battle, or does nothing at all.) But I'd argue that "success, but you used your only reroll for the day" is success at a cost.
Come to think of it, I've been fiating that sort of thing myself. Trying to improvise rules for a PC's flying kick against an aerial foe in my last session, I made him roll acrobatics. When he got a mediocre 14, I decided that he could either auto-miss his attack, or get a regular attack, but fall prone after - his choice. (He chose the latter.)
By that argument, if casting Fireball reduces the number of spells you have available that day, that would be success at a cost. Using a limited use ability isn't success at a cost, it's resource management. Pathfinder has lots of resource management mechanics, ki points, spells, rage rounds, potions, etc.
In addition, rerolling can still result in failure, meaning it isn't success at a cost.
Your example of the acrobatic kick is a perfect example. I think it's perfectly fine to add it in with GM-fiat, it's better than nothing.
If I understand correctly, the more commonly used term for what you are describing is "partial failure".
Am I understanding correctly?
They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
Part of the design philosophy of PFRPG was to streamline and speed up gameplay from 3.x, doing what you suggest would have been the polar opposite. It would require more bookkeeping.
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Part of the design philosophy of PFRPG was to streamline and speed up gameplay from 3.x, doing what you suggest would have been the polar opposite. It would require more bookkeeping.They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
Perhaps more importantly - PFS (a decent chunk of the customer base) is designed to be as standardized as possible. Success at a cost mechanics are inherently up to the GM to arbitrate exactly what the cost is - and that would remove any semblance of standardization.
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Wild boars charge, and impale themselves. That's what they do.
I'm too lazy to make a Geico Insurance related alias to exploit this statement for a cheap one-off topical commerical based joke.
Where is captain yesterday when you need him?
Part of the design philosophy of PFRPG was to streamline and speed up gameplay from 3.x, doing what you suggest would have been the polar opposite. It would require more bookkeeping.They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
What roleplaying game have you played that included a success-at-a-cost mechanic that required bookkeeping, beyond what would be required for a pass/fail mechanic?
I've played a half-dozen, or more, with that kind of mechanic and I can't think of one where it increased the amount of bookkeeping. If you're unfamiliar with the mechanic, I would recommend seeing how it operates in a game before you pass judgement with hypotheticals.
I will admit it does make a roll take longer. Which is why I've said several times, I wouldn't consider adding this kind of mechanic to combat. I think it would be well suited to a revision of the skill system though.
Perhaps more importantly - PFS (a decent chunk of the customer base) is designed to be as standardized as possible. Success at a cost mechanics are inherently up to the GM to arbitrate exactly what the cost is - and that would remove any semblance of standardization.Part of the design philosophy of PFRPG was to streamline and speed up gameplay from 3.x, doing what you suggest would have been the polar opposite. It would require more bookkeeping.They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
Certain parts of the game are already not used by PFS.
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Wild boars charge, and impale themselves. That's what they do.Does the Brace "stance" happen immediately, or, like a Readied Action, happen when triggered, which, in this case, is the Charge?
So, you ready an action to Brace. You don't change stance, or anything, like a normal Readied Action. Enemy Charges, the Readied Action(Brace) triggers, you deal double damage.
F@&~. you.
Actually only one charges into the spear (that would be Wilbur) the rest of us are tearing out your knee ligaments, of course that's not where the true value of us Boars lay tho, there's a reason French people call us "Truffle Hounds" (i mean besides the french being a#$#*+*s and needing to come up with dismissive nicknames for anything not french).
So think of that next time you dine out at a fancy restaurant some stinky f$$$ing pig found that truffle you paid so very much for:-)
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That'll do pig, that'll do.
Certain parts of the game are already not used by PFS.Perhaps more importantly - PFS (a decent chunk of the customer base) is designed to be as standardized as possible. Success at a cost mechanics are inherently up to the GM to arbitrate exactly what the cost is - and that would remove any semblance of standardization.Part of the design philosophy of PFRPG was to streamline and speed up gameplay from 3.x, doing what you suggest would have been the polar opposite. It would require more bookkeeping.They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
The PFRPG design philosophy also follows most of the 3.5 design philosophy, which includes minimizing the need for GM calls beyond simple reading comprehension when it comes to mechanically heavy aspects of systems. Your suggestion opposes that philosophy pretty heavily. Which is fine for another game, but wanting to push it onto Pathfinder is basically saying that you think your design principles are better than the ones PF currently follows(for whatever reason). Which may or may not be right, but you should probably point that out first or at least acknowledge that you would prefer the game this way but you are not trying to speak from the perspective of a professional game designer creating a general purpose system for all of the people who play the PFRPG - it's just what you personally would enjoy as a GM or a player.
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They're very, very similar. They often occupy the same space in the pass/fail spectrum, sometimes both are an option, or some systems use one but not the other. Some systems use partial success in one area and success at a cost in another.
Success at a cost - you do the thing you set out to do, but something bad happens also.
Partial success - you achieve part of the thing you set out to do.
It's a subtle difference. But all in all, it's still a piece of gaming tech that I think Pathfinder would benefit from exploring this or similar concepts.
I like the idea, which I've most recently seen in Mutants & Masterminds (although I'm sure it's in tons of games), of grades of success.
Instead of 'it totally works' or 'it totally fails,' such as with a charm person or disintegrate, which either 'wins' or does absolutely nothing and represents a wasted action, things go in stages.
Flesh to Stone only turns someone fully to stone on a great success. Otherwise it causes some surface stone formation that entangles or slows the target for a few rounds. Sleep only puts someone to sleep on a full success, otherwise it makes them drowsy and reduces their speed / initiative / whatever for a short time. Every condition ends up being like shaken / frightened or sickened / nauseated, coming in a couple of stages, so that if you fail to Dominate someone, you might still Daze them for a round or two, and not have completely wasted your action. (Conditions that currently lack a meaningful 'lower grade', such as Blindness, might gain one, like a version of Dazzled that includes the 20% miss chance given to someone benefiting from partial concealment, or the Petrified / slowed or entangled option mentioned above.)
But, until there's some meaningful way for melee classes to inflict minor conditions (without waiting for 10th level and buying into a feat chain that allows them to *maybe* inflict a condition if they happen to Critical, and therefore having no real control of when this happens), it would just be one more cool thing for casters, and therefore probably should be avoided.
That would be something I would like, but counts more as a rule that doesn't exist that I would like, a way for Fighters, etc. to sicken someone by slamming a morningstar into someone's junk, or dazzle/blind someone by opening a bleeding cut over their eye, starting at 1st level, for the weaker conditions, instead of waiting until Critical Focus / Stunning Critical, etc. come online, after PFS gameplay (and possibly the majority of home games?) has already ended anyway.
The Yesterday Signal does not disappoint. I'm glad I invested in it.
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The PFRPG design philosophy also follows most of the 3.5 design philosophy, which includes minimizing the need for GM calls beyond simple reading comprehension when it comes to mechanically heavy aspects of systems. Your suggestion opposes that philosophy pretty heavily. Which is fine for another game, but wanting to push it onto Pathfinder is basically saying that you think your design principles are better than the ones PF currently follows(for whatever reason). Which may or may not be right, but you should probably point that out first or at least acknowledge that you would prefer the game this way but you are not trying to speak from the perspective of a professional game designer creating a general purpose system for all of the people who play the PFRPG - it's just what you personally would enjoy as a GM or a player.
Bolding is mine.
This thread is about questioning the mechanics of the game. It's literally the premise of the thread.
Also, I highly doubt that Jason Bulmahn is looking at this thread thinking "Oh man, I have to implement all of these?!?" It's a throw-away thread, it will have no impact on anything anywhere. This isn't a RAW thread, because we are clearly talking about how we would change RAW if we could.
So, basically, your post, telling me that I should stop talking, is something that I don't appreciate.
No one in this thread is a designer for Paizo. So everything being said, even by YOU, is purely personal preference. It has nothing to do with the direction of the design philosophy of the game at all. To add, the entire premise of this thread is what we don't like about the game and why. In that light, you basically telling me to shut my mouth is highly disrespectful.
This thread is about questioning the mechanics of the game. It's literally the premise of the thread.
Also, I highly doubt that Jason Bulmahn is looking at this thread thinking "Oh man, I have to implement all of these?!?" It's a throw-away thread, it will have no impact on anything anywhere. This isn't a RAW thread, because we are clearly talking about how we would change RAW if we could.
Not even that. It's just asking what you don't like. (I don't like hit points and experience points, but I'm not suggesting Pathfinder should be changed to remove them).
"If it didn't have that, it wouldn't be Pathfinder!" and similar comments are non sequiturs, really. The response is understandable - no doubt the rules forums are used to seeing "we should change this...." threads. This isn't one of them though - it's asking a more primitive question than "What do you think should be changed?"
AC vs BAB. AC doesn't scale fast enough compared to BAB and in the mid to high levels and any attack at full BAB is an auto-hit unless you pour EVERYTHING into AC. We need more stacking ways to raise that, especially touch AC. It shouldn't be this f@&+ing hard to be defensive!
AC vs BAB. AC doesn't scale fast enough compared to BAB and in the mid to high levels and any attack at full BAB is an auto-hit unless you pour EVERYTHING into AC. We need more stacking ways to raise that, especially touch AC. It shouldn't be this f+!$ing hard to be defensive!
In my opinion, the problem here isn't that AC scales too slowly, it's that BAB scales too quickly.
I've proposed fixes for that in this thread.
AC vs BAB. AC doesn't scale fast enough compared to BAB and in the mid to high levels and any attack at full BAB is an auto-hit unless you pour EVERYTHING into AC. We need more stacking ways to raise that, especially touch AC. It shouldn't be this f#!#ing hard to be defensive!
Yeah, I think there's a reason a lot of other games based on the d20 system add scaling AC modifiers to class progression. It would be nice to have characters get naturally better at defense as they level, instead of it being almost entirely gear-dependent.
Well it would be best to bring down the binary nature of AC.
Armor as DR is always an option, but hated by many (??)
Then there is the Glancing hits concept, where AC is lot easier to get, but getting at least half of AC hits at reduced impact.
In the end, missing is boring so nobody wants lot of missing.
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Armor as DR is always an option, but hated by many (??)
To be fair, the Armor as DR system is hated because it's a tacked on set of optional rules that really don't work well within the system. It leads to a lot of wonky results that make it very clear Pathfinder was never designed to played that way.
Plenty of other game systems make an Armor as DR system work, but those games are all designed from the ground up to work that way. I think it would be very hard to make any rules for converting a game from AC to Armor as DR, because the underlying system math just doesn't support that.
In the end, missing is boring so nobody wants lot of missing.
Yes, but hitting and doing no damage is also boring (and harder to figure out a solution for). Interesting ways to scale AC without pouring everything into it would be nice. I'm led to think of combat expertise & fighting defensively, but they never really seem worth it. For example, if two equal people are fighting, and one fights defensively, they will overall be worse off for doing so (-4 hit +2 ac is the same as -4 hit, -2 hit for your enemy). It's interesting in concept, and in practice probably works out better than that math leads one to believe, but still...
I dislike traps and haunts in their entirety, at least as flatly presented. They're basically a list of binary objects where either the party rolls high enough and they do nothing, or the party does not and takes a bunch of damage / status effects etc. There's no interactivity. Of course, that's solved by the dm by making patterns, foreshadowing, etc, but I don't think that's ever laid out in any way.
Actually, I also dislike the CR system...sort of. I at least dislike that all characters of every class have the same CR because it enforces something. Because of that, there is an expectation that every class is equally potent in combat (whether this is actually the case is a different issue). That means that combat focused classes (fighter, barbarian) need to be of about the same threat as non-combat classes (rogue, sorcerer). But that means that such classes cannot have a niche in combat, despite (as is currently the case) sacrificing non-combat utility for it. Basically, the fighter who does nothing but fight is valued by CR as the same threat as the investigator who does everything else. So the fighter can't be much better at fighting without breaking the CR values, despite being overall of less value because he brings nothing but fighting to the party.
One final thing actually related to my first paragraph: I dislike that experimenting as a player is so hard. As an example, is it reasonable that a standard adventuring party with standard adventuring kit (including things like torches) could figure out that a troll's regeneration was stopped by fire WITHOUT succeeding on a knowledge roll? Could one figure out what type of DR an enemy had, again without the knowledge roll, before the fight was certainly lost? I don't think they can, and that's a little bothersome. It makes such encounters either succeed the knowledge check or brute force your way through. "Learning" as a pc seems difficult.
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I'm not a fan of Ranger's Favored Enemy, more specifically Humanoids. Human, Dwarves and Elves are not that different in terms of combat and having to take them separately is just awful. Then there's the fact that, a human raised and trained by elves, has only known elvish life, and has never even seen another human would still be vulnerable to a Ranger trained in the fighting tactics of Humans. I would love to see Favored Enemy: Humanoid (Common Races) be a thing...
Yeah, but then you'd take that first every time. I mean, humanoids comprise so much of your challenges. They're everything that isn't a monster! And giants!
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Objective Morality is my biggest pet peeve. Mostly because I find the idea of doubting whether you did the right thing far more interesting than just double checking with the powers that be.
The implementation of the unwritten "all magic sparkles" rule and the limited options for stealth casting leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I understand that something so potentially powerful as stealth casting in full view of the public should be hard to do, and probably regulated to high level play, but even with a high-level character who dedicated nearly all of their resources to the task--you're still likely to fail in Pathfinder.
That takes so many great tropes off the table as to be frightening--even ruining certain monsters and encounters published by Paizo themselves!
I strongly suspect that if you tried to implement archetypes as a mix of classes and talents, you would end up with a bloated 100+ class mess that still manages to be a thinly veiled classless system. The game would be better off moving to a completely classless system in that case.
That's not to say that there aren't problems with archetypes, but I expect that you would need something like them to give the classes modularity without allowing excessive bleed between classes.
Objective Morality is my biggest pet peeve. Mostly because I find the idea of doubting whether you did the right thing far more interesting than just double checking with the powers that be.
The easiest answer to this is that while 'Good' and 'Evil' (and 'Law' and 'Chaos') are absolutes, 'Right' is subjective. After all, Evil clerics don't think they're wrong - they get their power because they believe they are Right.
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The easiest answer to this is that while 'Good' and 'Evil' (and 'Law' and 'Chaos') are absolutes, 'Right' is subjective. After all, Evil clerics don't think they're wrong - they get their power because they believe they are Right.
That's about as pedantic a dodge as I've ever seen.
Objective good is the entire issue!
Objective Morality is my biggest pet peeve. Mostly because I find the idea of doubting whether you did the right thing far more interesting than just double checking with the powers that be.The easiest answer to this is that while 'Good' and 'Evil' (and 'Law' and 'Chaos') are absolutes, 'Right' is subjective. After all, Evil clerics don't think they're wrong - they get their power because they believe they are Right.
Sure, but it still brings things down to a binary answer, which I don't like. I prefer at least some ambiguity on questions of morality.
The ENTIRE POINT of different alignments is they have different ideas of what the best thing to do is. The 'Powers that Be' have different alignments and different agendas. Asking Iomedae if you did the 'right' thing will result in a different answer than if you ask Desna (because Iomedae prefers order) or Asmodeus (being he's Evil).
Because in that context, you're not really asking if you did the 'right' thing: you're asking if you did the LG thing (or CG thing, or LE thing). You're asking if you did the right thing according to the higher power you ask.
Now, that's a really helpful answer if your character worships Iomedae and wants to know if he did right by her, but I don't see how that situation changes if you allow Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos to be defined subjectively.
'Good vs. bad' and 'right vs. wrong' are subjective. That is fundamentally what drives conflict. 'Good vs. Evil' and 'Law vs. Chaos' being objective (or subjective) doesn't change that.