Why all the nerfs Paizo?

[Squirrel_Dude]

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

[Kudaku]

Ravingdork wrote:

Balance in table top roleplaying is like communism. It's a great idea in principle, but whenever people try to implement it, it always ends up a horrible reality.

I'd counter that balance in table top roleplaying is like social democracy. When applied properly, it's a great idea full stop.

The trick is to pursue balance without sacrificing diversity. PoW is a great example of how you can make non-caster classes able to keep up with 6th level casters and legitimately useful in their own right while still staying distinct and unique. Releasing the core fighter and the core wizard in the same book and then using that book as the balancing point for all later material is not.

[Kudaku]

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

I'd argue that lowering the ceiling and bringing up the floor of power levels would be a good thing. The more classes that can play and interact at the same power level without artificial limitations, the better. In that regard, Unchaining the Rogue and chaining the summoner were both steps in the right direction.

[Seven-Eyed Witch]

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

Bringing it down a peg would be awesome, but they're not doing anything like that. The Scarred Witch Doctor isn't the high end. Undercasting and Exploits are the high end. Instigate Psychic Duel is a 2nd-level Save or Lose against anything that isn't also a psychic caster, because you're not going to "duel", you're just going to freeze them and defend yourself while the party beats them to death in real life. The summoner isn't considered powerful because it got a great eidolon and Haste earlier, it's because it can Summon Monster X repeatedly for massive durations at a standard action, an ability that went untouched.

There was nothing wrong with Parry/Riposte. There is something wrong with dominate person. There was nothing wrong with pounce on a barbarian. There is something wrong with the strict fighter requirement of being able to reach and engage an enemy, usually on the ground, when enemies in the bestiary can fly, teleport, and become incorporeal.

The overall power level of the game continues to grow, and errata isn't touching it at all. The best way, honestly, would be to give up on 9th level casting except in special, limited thematic cases - remove the wizard, bring back warmages, beguilers, and dread necromancers, but at 6th-level casting with lots of helpful class features to compensate. Buff the summoner's eidolon and casting and take away its SLA Summon Monster duration boost. Stop making things like the psychic altogether - the occultist, mesmerist, and spiritualist are great. The medium is as great as it can be, considering almost all of Mark Seifter's work was cut for new psychic and wizard spells. That's the direction the game needs to go in.

Not nuking aasimar ages and vanara climb speed. That's not a power level concern.

[Jamie Charlan]

Actually let me inject an additional question before we even get to your meat of the matter:

Were all these changes useful, critical, or otherwise positive-adjectives in bringing the games overall power level down? Were even a majority?

Nothing went around smacking the arcanist down a notch, or making sure the psychic wasn't immune to the one thing that could stop it from casting spells. Some monkies can't climb as fast no more, and a bunch of planetouched casters just died of extremely-sudden-onset-Alzheimer. The Scarred Witch Doctor went from being an interesting con-based alternative to yet-another+2-INT

As for your actual question:
That literally depends on what parts of the game we're talking about:
-Full Casters could go down a peg or two; the 'prepared' types more than the 'spontaneous'
-The classes who can only do one thing, and not always all that well (Gunslingers, Fighters, Kineticists...) on the other hand need to go UP a peg or two. Their damage might be fine (er, not for kineticists by a good 50%, seriously, what the hell) but "I kill thing now" is all they're good at, and EVERYONE in the game can kill things good already (except... you know). They need options, they need versatility, they need the power to impact the world around them in ways OTHER than "I waste it with my water balloons full of opium"
-Races that are worth 6-7RP could certainly use a step up... but uh, first we'd need to fix that RP system entirely because hooooo boy!

There's ... not really a "better way to accomplish it"... or rather, "changing existing rules" IS the right way, but this latest attempt to do so was equal parts corrupt, negligent, arbitrary, sarcastic and petty. The right way, done any which way but RIGHT.

So uh, the better way I suggest would be for it to be done by someone whose head is neither in the ground nor in their rear. They also need to listen to people whose heads are not in such dark places either. "Uh well it was fine for us because our cleric's just a blaster/healbot and no one's optimized beyond having the right character sheet and maybe their name spelled right" anecdotes about how a class you've not tested extensively are USELESS to this game, and the full-on a@+%!!!s who want to keep things as they are so their spechul-wittle-T1 gets to be that much better (including at melee when he wants, but SHHHHHHH!) than the poor non-unchained-monk arguing back and forth that "GAME IZ FINE, LRN2PLY" need to shut up and think about something other than their DMPC for once.

EDIT: In regards to the least tiers needing a way to impact things, ANYONE can roleplay. Don't pretend everything's fine with the class just because the fighter can roleplay to try and get around his major mechanical failures as a class: ANYONE can roleplay. The cleric his god worships can roleplay just as much, he's just not nearly as hampered and doing it for bonuses and fun rather than to try and desperately avoid having to roll against his pathetic-if-even-it-was-trained skill ranks. Seriously. How people can keep bringing that up as if it was the solution... that's got to be maliciously deliberate.

[Bandw2]

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

sure if they didn't start at the bottom(martials) and actually went for the source of the most powerful options (CRB.)

[BretI]

Jamie Charlan wrote:

Nothing went around smacking the arcanist down a notch...

Except the change to Consume Spell and Consume Magic Item that many Arcanist (Occultist) archetypes were looking to use in order to do more than one max value summon at mid to high level.

[Pixie, the Leng Queen]

Well they cant let the Arcanist steal the Summoner's spot light lol.

Im still confused about why they made the Blood Summoner... as if THAT class needed even more power.

[Purple Dragon Knight]

To the OP: I'm glad that Paizo has the courage to curb stomp the broken things in the game, put them back in the box, shake it, and let it come back out all nice and nerf-like.

That demonstrates vision and courage to make a product that will still be working years from now.

To simply drop the ball and accept the broken-ness of something would be a tell-tale sign that "the guys upstairs with a higher paygrade than us are making a 4th or 5th edition and they no longer give a s~&$ if we put out broken stuff... yay COMPLETE XXXX series / Book of Nine Munchkins type of garbage!"

Also keep in mind: one day they'll come out with a great Pathfinder computer game for home PC or Xbox or WiiU or PSX, and then you'll be happy that all classes are equal to one another for game replay value! :)

PS: in a video game, it's easy to nerf the wizard, as you just don't make certain spells available or design them to produce a standardized effect (in cases of spells that are open-ended, like silent image and wish...)*

*Edit: wait a min... could a DM doing a proper job actually do this? :)

[ZZTRaider]

Tormsskull wrote:

Otherwhere wrote:

But in answer to your question: yes, Players do feel that the rules should prevail. And it's not unfair, as part of the basis of Pathfinder was to put power back in the hands of the Players by outlining mechanics for so many things.

Thanks for clarifying. I think this goes back to different group expectations. No one I play with thinks that the rules trump the GM. That makes it a little difficult for me to understand the people who do play this way.

Personally, I see Rule 0 as being primarily for dealing with cases where the rules are silent. Tabletop RPGs are great with that; you can still do things that aren't covered by the rules, because the DM can come up with something on the fly to handle it. That's one of the things that really sets tabletop games apart from computer games.

For the things the rules talk about, however, I must assume that the rules are correct. (For these purposes, pre-written house rules that modify the base rules are still considered "the rules".) I don't have nearly thirty years of experience in the game world to understand how things work there... but my character might. To properly roleplay my character, I must understand the world he lives in and how he would interact with it. The rules are what tell me how the world works and how I can interact with it. The rules let me consider potential actions and evaluate their consequences.

There's still other details, to be sure. The rules don't tell me anything about the country my character is from or the major political figures in the port town to the south, but it is easy to recognize that I don't know these things and should ask.

Without being told ahead of time, there's no way to recognize ahead of time that the rules I've been given don't apply. I make decisions about what my character would do based on those rules, and when I'm suddenly told that we're ignoring what the Core Rulebook says when it comes up, I feel slighted. My character would most certainly have known how his spells work and would have acted more appropriately with that knowledge.

Sometimes it's okay. Everything it affects is in a short time span and easily retconned to make sense again. I simply cast a different spell that's still useful or move to a more advantageous position.

Sometimes that's not so easy (or even necessarily desirable), because the initial decision making was done days (in game) prior, and the problem doesn't become apparent until the critical point during plan execution. Fixing the misconception at that point potentially invalidates hours of gameplay.

I think the goal should be to minimize those instances. It takes away from player agency. It can force characters to end up doing something that is actually out of character (but seemed in character to the player, based on their flawed knowledge). Those things aren't fun, and fun is the whole point of playing the game.

So yes, a skilled and experienced DM can fix the issues present in the rules as published. But unless those changes are codified and available to the players, doing so can lead to very different expectations between people and cause the game to fail that way instead.

[Roadie]

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:

Book of Nine Munchkins

Just saying this makes it blatantly obvious you don't know what you're talking about.

[Tormsskull]

ZZTRaider wrote:

Personally, I see Rule 0 as being primarily for dealing with cases where the rules are silent.

In my group, the actual term "Rule 0" doesn't even mean anything. The group knows that the GM can change the rules as needed, and expects the GM will do so in a thoughtful way. The players simply accept the fact that the GM is the final arbiter of the rules.

ZZTRaider wrote:

There's still other details, to be sure. The rules don't tell me anything about the country my character is from or the major political figures in the port town to the south, but it is easy to recognize that I don't know these things and should ask.

That's how my group treats all the rules. When in doubt, players may ask the GM "Would my character know anything about x?" If there's confusion over how something works, I'll generally make a ruling and then move on, sometimes asking one of the players to look up the rule in the rule book.

ZZTRaider wrote:

Without being told ahead of time, there's no way to recognize ahead of time that the rules I've been given don't apply. I make decisions about what my character would do based on those rules, and when I'm suddenly told that we're ignoring what the Core Rulebook says when it comes up, I feel slighted.

I think expecting everyone to act in good faith goes a long way to resolving these kinds of issues. In a previous thread, the issue of 20d6 max falling damage was brought up. I explained that I don't follow that rule, i.e., people can't fall from orbit and then keep walking around.

Someone implied that their character would know that they have more than 120 hp, and thus they would know they have no chance of dying by falling from orbit. To me that is an absurdity.

On many issues I'm sure I would agree with you that the PC would have a good understanding of their chances. For example, how likely they are to be able to jump across a 15 foot ravine. Presumably growing up in the world, the character has jumped around or seen others jump around and has a rough idea.

Other issues are much less likely to come up in regular life for the character (like falling from orbit,) so players shouldn't be able to use the mechanics of the game to impart knowledge to their characters in these kind of examples.

That being said, I'm a big proponent of the rewind when the player was acting in good faith. Punishing a player for a misunderstanding of the rules (RAW or otherwise) is never my intent.

[Entryhazard]

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:

To the OP: I'm glad that Paizo has the courage to curb stomp the broken things in the game, put them back in the box, shake it, and let it come back out all nice and nerf-like.

That demonstrates vision and courage to make a product that will still be working years from now.

Just to make sure and not fall in the Poe's Law later: is this sarcasm right?

[Bandw2]

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:

To the OP: I'm glad that Paizo has the courage to curb stomp the broken things in the game, put them back in the box, shake it, and let it come back out all nice and nerf-like.

That demonstrates vision and courage to make a product that will still be working years from now.

To simply drop the ball and accept the broken-ness of something would be a tell-tale sign that "the guys upstairs with a higher paygrade than us are making a 4th or 5th edition and they no longer give a s~@+ if we put out broken stuff... yay COMPLETE XXXX series / Book of Nine Munchkins type of garbage!"

Also keep in mind: one day they'll come out with a great Pathfinder computer game for home PC or Xbox or WiiU or PSX, and then you'll be happy that all classes are equal to one another for game replay value! :)

PS: in a video game, it's easy to nerf the wizard, as you just don't make certain spells available or design them to produce a standardized effect (in cases of spells that are open-ended, like silent image and wish...)*

*Edit: wait a min... could a DM doing a proper job actually do this? :)

still their recent errata made a lot of people waste their money on a hard copy. (i didn't but i still think it should be delt with)

also we're back to the "it's not a problem because GMs can fix it" again?

if it's fixable why can't the "book of the nine munchkins" be fixed by you when it's released as well? probably by not using it?

[knightnday]

Has anyone considered comprising a list of the questions they'd like answered? Maybe getting Kobold Cleaver to put one together, as he seemed to like making things?

I say this because an organized list of questions might be much easier for the devs to address than sorting through the arguments of the last 1000 posts for the actual issues people would like to know about.

[Petty Alchemy]

I think the main points were made in the first few pages, before some people came in to provide their rendition of "Everything is Awesome" ft. Rule 0.

[DinosaursOnIce]

Kudaku wrote:

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

I'd argue that lowering the ceiling and bringing up the floor of power levels would be a good thing. The more classes that can play and interact at the same power level without artificial limitations, the better. In that regard, Unchaining the Rogue and chaining the summoner were both steps in the right direction.

+1

[graystone]

Jamie Charlan wrote:

Entryhazard wrote:

I want to see what happens if rope trick is cast while standing on a slope

By RAW?

Next stop, diagonal city.

Clearly the world shifts so the the slope is now flat ground... ;)

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

The overall power level is fine, it's just that there is TOO much swing in power levels in the classes and options. Useless trap options sit next to top of the line ones. Crappy things need raised and some over the line things need dropped but BOTH need done in a reasoned and measured manner. As it is, things that are thought of as too good are crushed until they are suboptimal and underperforming things are either left untouched or dropped even further because...

As for suggestions: using an even, balanced hand would be nice. Instead of destroying everything with a nuke, drop things down to an expectable and useful level. Instead of mostly lowering power, take some time seeing what's underperforming and give it a boost. If they had more Bolt Ace and brawler proficiency changes and less Divine Grace and scarred witch doctor the uproar wouldn't have the intensity it does now.

[hiiamtom]

HWalsh wrote:

Actually it DOES say it is on the ground:

http://www.mathopenref.com/perpendicular.html

Perpendicular means "at right angles". A line meeting another at a right angle, or 90° is said to be perpendicular to it. In the figure above, the line AB is perpendicular to the line DF. If they met at some other angle we would say that AB meets DF 'obliquely'. Move the point A around and create both situations. Move the mouse carefully to get AB exactly perpendicular to DF.

A line meeting another at a right angle.

From the spell description:
"one end of the rope rises into the air until the whole rope hangs perpendicular to the ground"

That means LITERALLY that one end of the rope rises into the air until the whole rope hangs perpendicular (meaning meets or crosses at a right angle) to the ground. Meaning that one end of the rope must be touching the ground or the spell does not work.

In mathematics, a line has infinite length which is a crucial part of the definition of perpendicularity. According to the definitions you are using a plane and a line must be touching to be perpendicular just as the definition of parallel is that the lines will never touch at any point along it's length.

According to your misuse of language a rope that floats in midair is parallel to the ground even if it is at a right angle with respect to the ground. That should be enough to show the flaw in your justification.

A line segment is the description of a line (infinite length) between two set endpoints along it's length. A line segment can be perpendicular to a plane without touching that plane. I suggest you play with this useful tool some:

https://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/perpendicular-lines.html

[Purple Dragon Knight]

Entryhazard wrote:

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:

To the OP: I'm glad that Paizo has the courage to curb stomp the broken things in the game, put them back in the box, shake it, and let it come back out all nice and nerf-like.

That demonstrates vision and courage to make a product that will still be working years from now.

Just to make sure and not fall in the Poe's Law later: is this sarcasm right?

You keep answering threads like this... is this proper use of grammar right?

[Purple Dragon Knight]

Bandw2 wrote:

still their recent errata made a lot of people waste their money on a hard copy.

It would be a greater waste of money not to fix it. The book would essentially forever exist as a broken part of a larger engine. You either fix or replace the part, or you forever commit to change all future parts of the system to build around that failure.

[Alex Smith 908]

Purple Dragon Knight wrote:

To the OP: I'm glad that Paizo has the courage to curb stomp the broken things in the game, put them back in the box, shake it, and let it come back out all nice and nerf-like.

That demonstrates vision and courage to make a product that will still be working years from now.

To simply drop the ball and accept the broken-ness of something would be a tell-tale sign that "the guys upstairs with a higher paygrade than us are making a 4th or 5th edition and they no longer give a s%~# if we put out broken stuff... yay COMPLETE XXXX series / Book of Nine Munchkins type of garbage!"

Also keep in mind: one day they'll come out with a great Pathfinder computer game for home PC or Xbox or WiiU or PSX, and then you'll be happy that all classes are equal to one another for game replay value! :)

PS: in a video game, it's easy to nerf the wizard, as you just don't make certain spells available or design them to produce a standardized effect (in cases of spells that are open-ended, like silent image and wish...)*

*Edit: wait a min... could a DM doing a proper job actually do this? :)

>Claiming against all logic that Tome of Battle was broken/loved by munchkins

>Condescending references to video games
>Blatant Oberoni Fallacy

Guys I think I got a Bingo here.

[Chris Lambertz]

Locking for reasons indicated earlier upthread.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, if you have any feedback relative to the questions I posted here, you can forward them to [e-mail] or [e-mail].