|
b)Only giving system fixes to the fighter to boost them up, so the fighter is kinda half ok and all the other martials are still stuck with the same crappy full attack routine, meaning literally nothing has improved with the system from the players' point of view unless someone writes "Fighter" on their sheetI see a lot of people complaining about the "full attack routine," or saying martials can only "full attack, full attack, full attack."
What are you expecting for martials? Are you looking for martials to be the same as casters? "I use Zen Blade Strike. Okay, I move ten feet then use Fortress of Steel and redirect any attacks at the nearest enemy. Okay, then I use Flurry of Throwing Axes?"
depends on the type of martial I'm playing. Issebella Jurdac doesn't fight like Gene of the Pits or Bu Lu the hidden blade; and none of them fights like Sir Fullattack. (ironically only Bu Lu would want to be a BoNS/PoW style character you're describing)
Though the only full attack problem is, unless it's a fight, they can rarely contribute to the party in a meaningful way, and that is just boring.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I see a lot of people complaining about the "full attack routine," or saying martials can only "full attack, full attack, full attack."
What are you expecting for martials? Are you looking for martials to be the same as casters? "I use Zen Blade Strike. Okay, I move ten feet then use Fortress of Steel and redirect any attacks at the nearest enemy. Okay, then I use Flurry of Throwing Axes?"
Rather than asking a question like that and derailing this thread, why don't you go to The Official Martial-Caster Discussion Index? There are already literally thousands of posts answering that question!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
wizard breaks the games narrative and has a larger narrative control. this is less banable, and really only comes from specific spells, so they ban the spells.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
...What is it that you think I meant by that part of my post? I'm still not following your complaint, and I wonder if that's where the miscommunication is.I mean, there are high fantasy martials, there are non high fantasy ones too. Why does the existence of the non high fantasy ones bother?
different levels of "fantasy-ness" allowed for different character options,
Here's my interpretation:
Some players like the existence of mundane PCs who can only do realistic things, whose options are limited to the (thousands of) things that a real person could do.
Pathfinder currently supports characters like that, but also provides magical-martial characters who are effective in battle, and who also have a variety of impossible abilities.
You sound like you'd prefer it if high-level Fighters could do fantastical things. To some people, that spoils the concept of the Fighter. "Why don't you just play a (insert partial-caster character class here) if you want to do things like that?"
Some people actually enjoy martial-caster option disparity...
So banning some spells is the same as banning the whole class? If a wizard is denied, to pick at random, simulacrum, they are no longer allowed in the game and are useless?True - while wizards themselves are never banned, often in home games certain spells are. And since spells are where virtually all of a wizard's power comes from, it amounts to the same thing.(while I'm on that tangent I find it curious that I've seen certain Summoners, Gunslingers and even Magus, for some reason, banned for doing something overpowered but never wizards. This is the only way I can explain this phenomena. )
Straw man. No one said the wizard was useless if you ban a few spells, just that trimming their spell list has an impact on their power, obviously.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
...What is it that you think I meant by that part of my post? I'm still not following your complaint, and I wonder if that's where the miscommunication is.I mean, there are high fantasy martials, there are non high fantasy ones too. Why does the existence of the non high fantasy ones bother?
different levels of "fantasy-ness" allowed for different character options,
Here's my interpretation:
Some players like the existence of mundane PCs who can only do realistic things, whose options are limited to the (thousands of) things that a real person could do.
Pathfinder currently supports characters like that, but also provides magical-martial characters who are effective in battle, and who also have a variety of impossible abilities.
You sound like you'd prefer it if high-level Fighters could do fantastical things. To some people, that spoils the concept of the Fighter. "Why don't you just play a (insert partial-caster character class here) if you want to do things like that?"
Some people actually enjoy martial-caster option disparity...
As long as you throw out the cr system, because its meaningless right now.
|
So banning some spells is the same as banning the whole class? If a wizard is denied, to pick at random, simulacrum, they are no longer allowed in the game and are useless?True - while wizards themselves are never banned, often in home games certain spells are. And since spells are where virtually all of a wizard's power comes from, it amounts to the same thing.(while I'm on that tangent I find it curious that I've seen certain Summoners, Gunslingers and even Magus, for some reason, banned for doing something overpowered but never wizards. This is the only way I can explain this phenomena. )
That's not what I said at all - please don't straw-man me.
If you read closely, you'll see the above quote I responded to was "certain Summoners, Gunslingers and even Magus, for some reason, banned for doing something overpowered" - no mention of banning entire classes. That was something you added on your own.
And yes - banning specific spells does pretty much the same thing to a wizard that banning a specific archetype (Synthesist Summoner for example) does to the above classes. In both cases - they prevent certain OP combos. (Said combos are one of, if not THE main reason wizards are so potent.)
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
I started posting here during the magazine days. It was a tightly-knit community, Paizo's APs (Age of Worms was finishing up, people were gearing up for Savage Tide) were top-notch, and people like James and Erik, whose names we all knew, were always posting. I switched from other systems to 3.0/3.5 solely to play in the Dungeon adventures without having to convert between systems.
After playing Savage Tide, it was clear that martials weren't keeping up at mid- to high-level, but the game was still fun -- mostly because the adventures were so imaginative.
When the print magazines were cancelled, it was a sad day for everyone here. Rise of the Runelords was launched, and I unhesitatingly became a charter subscriber.
Eventually 4e was announced and Paizo did something we thought was audacious at the time: they'd make their own 3.5 variant. A lot of outsiders showed up for the playtest, and a lot of them had a lot of the same suggestions about how to fix the existing, well-known problems with 3.5, but their posting style was often sarcastic and confrontational, and we all hoped they'd go away. And they did, but unfortunately so did their suggestions.
After the Core Rulebook was released, it was clear that none of the problems with 3.5 -- ones that I'd seen in play but didn't want to believe existed -- had been fixed. My home group played, and we were mostly rules people, and we were finding that we were putting too much effort into fighting the rules, and had too little left for actually playing. So we started tweaking them, and eventually rewrote them all -- new action economy, martials that kept up, multiclassing that worked, a lot of extraneous sub-systems standardized. But despite the tweaks, it was still essentially Pathfinder, and we still bought and used Paizo adventures, and it was all good.
With time, though, the divergence between their rules and ours has grown, because the design philosophies are so opposed.
I find that I no longer really want to play Pathfinder -- too much effort as a DM to get it to work, and too much effort as a player to get the mechanics to even vaguely support most character concepts. I'm sitting with a new group now that uses PF as a base because they're tired of new editions, but even they have a number of house rules to keep the game from being too far off from what they want to play, and the DM strenuously enforces a 2e "feel" and playstyle, and so it's still clear that we're fighting the system, not working with it, in order to get the play experience we want.
So that's where I am. I'm here because I've been here so long I think of the Paizo boards as a home away from home. I still like their adventures for the most part, which is what drew me to here to begin with. I just don't really dig their game rules.
to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
wizard breaks the games narrative and has a larger narrative control. this is less banable, and really only comes from specific spells, so they ban the spells.
I think gunslinger is banned most often out of aesthetics-- no sci fi in my fantasy/ no guns in my medieval world.
In my opinion the reason to ban summoners is the Kool Aid urinating they do. Summoner (APG Summoner that is) gets to do everything better than the people dedicated to doing them-- better at fighting than fighters, better at spellcasting than wizards (I mean they get haste sooner, ect) they just invalidate too many other people's fun.
I never find that the guy who sits down wanting to be a warrior is upset when the wizard player wizards; but when the "spell caster" gets better attacks than him he is upset.
|
to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
***
I think gunslinger is banned most often out of aesthetics-- no sci fi in my fantasy/ no guns in my medieval world.
***
I think it's a bit of both. If I'm running a campaign where I've decided to ban the Gunslinger (I don't always), it's because the specific idea I have for the campaign involves enemy types like dragons, giants, etc. and the firearm system in general and the Gunslinger in particular breaks the math the system is designed around. Or because I've got new players and I don't want to deal with waiting to find out if they're going to make a Gunslinger who's utterly useless or one who's going to be built to negate all the class' (poorly implemented) inherent balances like misfires and blow the rest of the group out of the water in the DPR department.
I think it's a bit of both. If I'm running a campaign where I've decided to ban the Gunslinger (I don't always), it's because the specific idea I have for the campaign involves enemy types like dragons, giants, etc. and the firearm system in general and the Gunslinger in particular breaks the math the system is designed around. Or because I've got new players and I don't want to deal with waiting to find out if they're going to make a Gunslinger who's utterly useless or one who's going to be built to negate all the class' (poorly implemented) inherent balances like misfires and blow the rest of the group out of the water in the DPR department.to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
***
I think gunslinger is banned most often out of aesthetics-- no sci fi in my fantasy/ no guns in my medieval world.
***
Or you could deny the gunslinger advanced and double barreled firearms and that way when they jump through all the hoops the PC ends up playing like an archer fighter with range issues, which then leaves them wondering why they didn't just make an archery ranger instead.
|
|
Or you could deny the gunslinger advanced and double barreled firearms and that way when they jump through all the hoops the PC ends up playing like an archer fighter with range issues, which then leaves them wondering why they didn't just make an archery ranger instead.I think it's a bit of both. If I'm running a campaign where I've decided to ban the Gunslinger (I don't always), it's because the specific idea I have for the campaign involves enemy types like dragons, giants, etc. and the firearm system in general and the Gunslinger in particular breaks the math the system is designed around. Or because I've got new players and I don't want to deal with waiting to find out if they're going to make a Gunslinger who's utterly useless or one who's going to be built to negate all the class' (poorly implemented) inherent balances like misfires and blow the rest of the group out of the water in the DPR department.to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
***
I think gunslinger is banned most often out of aesthetics-- no sci fi in my fantasy/ no guns in my medieval world.
***
I never do use advanced firearms (unless I happen to be running an adventure where they're expected, like a modern, steampunk, or Iron Gods type thing). Eliminating double-barrels goes a fair distance towards balancing it out, but a full BAB class targeting touch AC is something the system just isn't built to handle, so even if you pare down the number of attacks, the Gunslinger still rarely has trouble hitting the top of the DPR dogpile due to the unrivaled consistency of his damage-dealing capabilities. When you hit those higher levels, a Gunslinger can take full TWF, Rapid Shot, and Deadly Aim penalties and still have a better chance to hit with his 3rd attack than an archer does on his first. Sure, they've got to be closer to the opponent, but they've got great saves and DEX reliance + Nimble typically puts their AC right next to the anyone short of a smiting paladin, alongside great saves. But we're starting to derail a bit here and should probably take this to one of the (many existing) threads about the issues with firearms.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm gonna answer the OP.
I love the hell out of this game.
It has way less flaws than 3.5, which is what I switched from. I brought my group, mid-campaign, into the Pathfinder rules.
Within two sessions, they had all gone out and bought books.
I don't regret, for one second, playing Pathfinder.
It has issues, but less than 3.5.
This product is solid (though the book bindings could use a bit of improvement, I need to replace my Inner Sea Gods book already!).
Thank you, Paizo, for all the lovely work you do.
Fighters still aren't as good as Wizards, but they are WAY better than what they were a generation ago, and some of the archetypes improve them even more.
Good work.
...
One can rewrite the classes while keeping the guts of the game. For example a level 20 fighter could have BAB +20, 4 attacks as class features and base saves of +12/+10/+9. Multiple attacks at no penalty ids actually an AD&D thing not 5E.Certain spells can be rewrote or removed from the game. RAW the spellcasters get to double dip on the spell caster stat required to cast the spell and the spell level in terms of spell DC. Bonus DC to spell of the attribute is a bit much.
The problem is that "minor" changes like this destroy the system math. Like it or not, the expected saves of creatures at each level have been balanced around the DCs scaling at a certain speed. Changing the DCs means changing every single creature and class save progression to suit, or accepting that balance is going to be even more screwy than usual a large chunk of the time (unless you manage to tweak it in just the right way to improve the balance, but frankly any approach stemming from "casters get to double dip" isn't an approach concerned about system math and thus won't keep the math balanced except by a sheer fluke).
As for giving the fighter better attacks...yeah, fighters don't need more numbers. Amping their DPR just makes it even more binary than it already is, where the majority of things that play rock em sock em with the fighter get obliterated and the things that don't wreck the fighter utterly. MOAR DAMAGE will encorage GMs to *not* send things into melee with the fighter. Great. Oh yeah, and the uber-DPR will discourage further fixes, because then the fighter will have god-like DPR and will actually get to regularly apply it. It's like 1 step forward, 2 steps back.
I should probably point out that making fixes to the system fighter only is a stupid approach to game design. You have the option of either a) fixing the attack paradigm for everyone and making the game much better but the fighter is still behind unless you do something else to them as well, or b)Only giving...
If I wanted a fixed 3.x system the math would be overhauled. Feats, classes, spells, and the combat rules would be overhauled. It would not be backwards compatible but the game would still resemble 3.x for the most part. It would have BAB, fort/ref, will etc. Weapon focus feat for example would apply to all weapons, power attack would be overhauled to reduce the disparity between 2 handed weapons and everything else and I would consider getting rid of the +50% bonus to two handed weapons.
Saves would go up and by level 20 there would only be a 3-4 point difference between a good and bad save, spell DCs would come down being tied to the level of the spell and blast spells would be indirectly buffed because save or dies/suck would require debuffs to reliably use them.
Relative to their editions the 3.x fighter is actually worse than the AD&D 2E fighter and the UA 1E fighter and the rules cyclopedia BECMI fighter as well and that stuff is from 30 years ago for some of it.
Paladins are actually decent in Pathfinder and great in 5E and I do not consider them a martial type that is mostly Rogues, Fighters and Monks. The warrior types would also be able to move and full attack and all the BAB +20 classes would have an extra attack at level 6,11,16 as multiple attacks would be tied to BAB or maybe even be made class features to discourage level dips.
Between 5E and AD&D concepts I think you could fix 3.x without having to invent a new game a'la 4E and 5E.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
For myself: I like the setting and I like the quality of the adventure paths.
Adventure paths particularly are a true boon for older GM like me, that do not have the time anymore for homebrewed settings and adventures, and have to be ready for an evening session after a grueling working week.
I like the rule system changes introduced more than 3.5e, and for sure much more than 4e.
There are also many things of the rule system that drive me crazy: coming from systems like GURPS, finding that feats like "Altitude affinity" do cost the same as, for example, "Craft Wondrous Items" seems quite absurd.
Or the lawyeristic design of the rules that strongly encourage a "right-way/wrong-way" mindset in players. I understand the need for a "standard" set for PS play, but for those like me that do not partake, it's only an annoyance when dealing with a certain kind of players.
By the way, I often hear that Pathfinder is an "easy" system for new players, but the number of traps, the "dependency hell" of feats and classes, to borrow the sysadmin term, and the strongly structured class progression are poison for casual players, especially if they've more expert ones around that tend to either "guide" or eclipse them, interfering with their character development.
On the other hand, the same things that IMHO make it a not especially good RP rule system, make it almost addictive as a game system. Creating an optimized character build, capable of being a valuable party resource while maintaining coherency of background options, an original concept and working around the many many obstacles and limitations of the system, is a worthy challenge that have stolen many of my hours.
Between 5E and AD&D concepts I think you could fix 3.x without having to invent a new game a'la 4E and 5E.
Using third party that idea has worked for me.
I do want to say that for a lot of reasons Pathfinder upsets me the least of games I've played. People recommend things all the time but I always feel like I'm playing Pathfinder-Babies, or 'lets abstract things until nothing makes sense in the name of proper game design'. I know Pathfinder can get complicated but seriously some games might as well not have rules at all.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I like the game, warts, oddities, and all.
I play in other systems to, but only really as breaks from Pathfinder (and those breaks are more for the rest of my group than they are for me).
Most other systems only have enough substance to them to hold my attention for a few months. After which I'm just sort of done with them.
Pathfinder has a enough going on with it that I could easily continue to play it for years, even if Paizo went out of business tomorrow.
Sums it up for me!
to be clear summoner and gunsligner are banned often because they break the system math, not the narrative. touch AC gets lower as you level up, so gunslinger just auto hits. summoner makes a better martial than a fighter, which is scary since their DPR is supposed to very high all the time, so the eidolon just does better.
wizard breaks the games narrative and has a larger narrative control. this is less banable, and really only comes from specific spells, so they ban the spells.
I also think part of it is that GMs in general are a lot quicker to ban anything that comes from outside the CRB, while stuff in the CRB is viewed as sacrosanct.
|
...I've been contemplating making a thread titled, "Do you like this game?", mostly because of the threads, starting from 3.0 days apparently, about the same problems. All this doomsaying is happening while the system as a whole has been thriving for over a decade rocked the entire RPG market twice and spawning so many clones, all while similar games that supposedly don't have these problems exist in a huge number. It makes it hard to know how to feel when the fans of the game say that the developers don't know what they're doing. Especially when I'm over here happily playing my games without the system self destructing every FAQ update. In the meantime the people that refuse to play Pathfinder have 'hostile online community' as their #2 reason to stay away from the game.
I'm not saying that I'm thrilled with the ACG situation, and I'll say that caster/martial disparity exists (although stopped existing in my games a while ago) but I have no where near the anger and disappointment I see on these boards or reason to start accusing the developers of having some sort of agenda against us. Yeah the ACG is a mess and now post-eratta my book is pretty useless but I do think they're trying the best they can but made a lot of mistakes in that book. I'd like to turn in my book for a discount on the second printing but its not a jump ship situation for me. I haven't noticed any real glitches in Occult Adventures so far so I feel like the ACG is a bad blip on the track record and nothing more.
And its not like I don't have the tools to jump ship if I wanted to. On my shelf is 5th edition, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fate, Fudge, Mutants and Masterminds, 13th age and True 20. In the case of 5th edition I know for a fact that its fairly easy to play adventure paths using 5th ed. I'm playing a game where that is happening right now. But I've been preferring Pathfinder and playing Pathfinder and liking Pathfinder, and buying Pathfinder.
We also have a very vocal developer base that communicate with
Do I like this game? No.
But let me elaborate, as I played quite a bit of Pathfinder switching to it at the start from a 3.5. Two things killed the system for me, one was Pathfinder Society, the other was the number of customization options.
My main pathfinder home game had ended, so I decided to try Society play, at first it was great. I one shot the first boss I faced with a lucky smite evil hit, I rolled a nat 20 diplomacy check that saved my group from what was a seemingly sure one or two deaths. But then we captured a boat.
So you might ask, who cares about a boat? Certainly not my paladin, he had no need for a boat, no skills for using one, nor any connection to the sea, but that boat is where the seams started to show with society play. No matter what, we could not keep the boat. That concept nagged at me, hounded me, for all the adventures my character was not free, unlike a home campaign my options were limited to just the specific things Society dictated, and the illusion of a living world was shattered, I never played society again.
So it seems like home games were the only ones left to me, and that is where customization killed off the remaining desire to play pathfinder. I had several campaigns back to back where I had a very clear concept of what I wanted my hero to be, and either it was impossible in the system, or the cost was so high my character would have been useless at anything else.
I looked at the hundreds if not thousands of feats, and most of them are garbage, and then I looked at my concept and realized that to be effective at grappling for instance, I'd need to take so many that there was room for nothing else. And if I wasn't a fighter? There was no chance. Suddenly all the things, all the options, it all seemed more like a trap than anything else. It isn't like the concepts I had were trying to be OP, far from it, I liked the thematic options of being a Steve Reeves inspired Hercules type that could grapple real well and punch good without being a fancy monk. The idea of being a deaf oracle with a raven familiar who translated things outside of my line of sight for me via morse code pecks on a plate I had built into my headgear. It didn't even make him equal to a non-deaf oracle, it was just thematically cool to me. I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get what I wanted, and for all the options, few of them ever particularly aided me in what I wanted to do. Even still having to get my DM to allow me use 3.5 feats for some of my concepts.
So here I am playing a Bard/Cleric multiclass half-elf in a second edition campaign, or the beastmaster dwarf with an owl who is just as big as I am in a Universal Battles game (in town he sits on my head and with a cloak over us, we look like a single large figure, dunno why but I enjoy that a lot). Both offering less 'options', and yet at the same time seemingly so much more free for me to play the characters I want.
I have come to see feats as being prohibitive to actually enjoying the game, and as a part of that have found the relative simplicity of others more liberating. Not to mention incredibly difficult to figure out what is and is not useful. I spent hours going over feats trying to find ones that seemed like they might be potentially applicable to what I wanted. There are just so many I may well have missed ones that might have been perfect for what I wanted. Someway to sort them all by unarmed, or defensive, sield related, etc. Or books specifically for certain styles of characters might have been useful.
All of that said, I did love it once, and played hundreds of hours of pathfinder over the years.
tl;dr: Used to like it but not anymore, for reasons.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree we should keep separate threads separate.
I like PF enough to play occasionally when a friend is running it, because it's fundamentally the same as my last favorite game. But I don't like it enough to buy or GM it. It's got enough minor changes to basically require relearning the game, but nothing's changed fundamentally enough to be worth the effort. Core PF is about as extensive as my 3.5 house rules became...except that PF doesn't address many of the things that my house rules did.
On the whole martial/caster issue: I've never met a new player at all concerned with 'realistic' fighters. Just D&D vets who have very specific and selective expectations about 'realism' based on the rules they learned to game with. I have however met new and old players who hate playing the chargen minigame, exemplified by stuff like feats and skill points.
So from my experience, there is value for some players in classes that just attack, attack, attack...but the 3e game engine defeats the very purpose of these classes by requiring them to play the chargen minigame. Also by implementing high-level attack, attack, attack as 'must not move more than 5 feet, then roll dice in order so that staggered ABs can be properly applied...'
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Too bad; I enjoy master baiting posts.
Erm, wait... ;-)
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I don't like Pathfinder, but Paizo's Orbital Mind Control Lasers keep forcing me to like it. Sometimes, I break free of their control and scream "RIFTS! I WANNA BE A GLITTER BOY!" at night, but then Cosmo flips the switch and once again I revert to an unapologetic rabid fanboy mode.
On a slightly more serious note, my absolutely favourite RPG is Ars Magic, but given lack of GMs/players for that one, I'm going with the game that has the most support material available and features many things that lift weight from DM shoulders.
Rifts makes the editing for the first printing of the Advanced Class Guide look great.
Though I prefer the earlier iterations of D&D, Pathfinder was easier to find players for, and dammit the Core books were well done and beautiful. On top of that, the campaign setting and APs were hands down some of the best stuff published for gaming in general.
That said, the system has been bloated beyond recognition in just the last couple of years, I fear its past the tipping point. The boards are stuffed to the brim with discussion of optimization and never-to-be-played 20th level "builds" to the point that I wonder how many folks are playing the table top game as opposed to sitting at home and endlessly tinkering with character concepts. All these new character classes seem to be filled with far more bookkeeping than a sense of wonder or adventure. The Swashbuckler is a good example of this - an awesome character concept that's perfectly easy to build with the core rules (and would be even easier if all the feat taxes were removed) reduced to a series of points and conditions and so on.
I'd love to see a completely overhauled Pathfinder 2.0, unafraid of burying the mistakes and obnoxious design complexity of d20's past. If anyone can do it, I think Paizo's excellent team can, and they have a great starting chassis in the Beginners Box.
The editing maybe poor. But at least most of the character options are worth taking. The same cannot be said of the ACG after the errata.
Seriously?
Vagabond.
They actually list soap and a garbage bag as part of their gear.
In the same book, you can play a dragon.
There was just as much trash in Rifts as there is in Pathfinder. More, actually, considering the disparity isn't just about spellcasters/non casters.
Mega damage... good lord... what a game. Had so much fun shooting civilians with my mega damage bazooka in that game.