I kind of like it when they "genericize" certain things. Why wouldn't other parts of the world be able to make Mage Tattoos?
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On the other hand, something that's only done in one part of the world, has a flavor where it otherwise would not. Golarion isn't a world of jet-setters where Americans travel to far distant lands... to eat at a MacDonalds.
Dragons, airships, teleportation, alchemical dragons, space ships, flight.... Nah, getting to distant lands isn't difficult for individuals who would have use of a magic tattoo.
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Alrighty because my brain is in that mode right now. Let's show you my arcane might.
Like, the conjurer is funny. But it's not funny.
Like here's a stat line for you.
Half Orc
Str:19
Dex:14
Con:14
Int:14
Wis: 7
Cha: 7Hilarious right?
So we get oen feat.
Ima take Improved Initiative because I can.
Than I'm going to take Compy familiar because I can.
So a +10 to initiative without even trying very hard.. I can hit +12 or even +14 easily.
But what school?
Enhancement is funny because I could enhance myself and force the fighter to run into my lognspear.
But, I'm feeling hilarious and grabbing Transmutation because 20 strength for free is too amusing to go without.
Okay then so we go with Protector archetype on familiar.
as for the rest? Eh, I don't care anymore at this point.If the fighter is an archer I can vanish and run right up to him and sunder his bow outside of his reach. If not I can take my time and get my ac up to 22, get 15 foot reach. Whatever floats my boat.Point being is this kind of thing is always incredibly silly.
This guy could buy or conjure a mount, a lance, and just run over the fighter probably.
Just curious, where do you get the proficiency for the longspear or lance?
A trait?
Alrighty because my brain is in that mode right now. Let's show you my arcane might.
Like, the conjurer is funny. But it's not funny.
Like here's a stat line for you.
Half Orc
Str:19
Dex:14
Con:14
Int:14
Wis: 7
Cha: 7Hilarious right?
So we get oen feat.
Ima take Improved Initiative because I can.
Than I'm going to take Compy familiar because I can.
So a +10 to initiative without even trying very hard.. I can hit +12 or even +14 easily.
But what school?
Enhancement is funny because I could enhance myself and force the fighter to run into my lognspear.
But, I'm feeling hilarious and grabbing Transmutation because 20 strength for free is too amusing to go without.
Okay then so we go with Protector archetype on familiar.
as for the rest? Eh, I don't care anymore at this point.If the fighter is an archer I can vanish and run right up to him and sunder his bow outside of his reach. If not I can take my time and get my ac up to 22, get 15 foot reach. Whatever floats my boat.Point being is this kind of thing is always incredibly silly.
This guy could buy or conjure a mount, a lance, and just run over the fighter probably.
Just curious, where do you get the proficiency for the longspear or lance?
A trait?
Hey look, an actual problem with the build. :P
Figured wizards had simple weapons, you know, because just about everyone else does.
Makes little difference really since he's a half orc and jsut get a falchion.
Lance proficiency is a feat away or maybe a trait if I dig deep enough.
Matters little really,. it's a joke build to play wiht a joke point. PvP scenarios like this are virtually useless in a balance discussion as the game is not balanced for 1 on 1 combat in that fashion.
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Alrighty because my brain is in that mode right now. Let's show you my arcane might.
Like, the conjurer is funny. But it's not funny.
Like here's a stat line for you.
Half Orc
Str:19
Dex:14
Con:14
Int:14
Wis: 7
Cha: 7Hilarious right?
So we get oen feat.
Ima take Improved Initiative because I can.
Than I'm going to take Compy familiar because I can.
So a +10 to initiative without even trying very hard.. I can hit +12 or even +14 easily.
But what school?
Enhancement is funny because I could enhance myself and force the fighter to run into my lognspear.
But, I'm feeling hilarious and grabbing Transmutation because 20 strength for free is too amusing to go without.
Okay then so we go with Protector archetype on familiar.
as for the rest? Eh, I don't care anymore at this point.If the fighter is an archer I can vanish and run right up to him and sunder his bow outside of his reach. If not I can take my time and get my ac up to 22, get 15 foot reach. Whatever floats my boat.Point being is this kind of thing is always incredibly silly.
This guy could buy or conjure a mount, a lance, and just run over the fighter probably.
Just curious, where do you get the proficiency for the longspear or lance?
A trait?
Hey look, an actual problem with the build. :P
Figured wizards had simple weapons, you know, because just about everyone else does.
Makes little difference really since he's a half orc and jsut get a falchion.
Lance proficiency is a feat away or maybe a trait if I dig deep enough.
Matters little really,. it's a joke build to play wiht a joke point. PvP scenarios like this are virtually useless in a balance discussion as the game is not balanced for 1 on 1 combat in that fashion.
True.
An asside, Heirloom Weapon trait could get you the prof. you'd need.
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This thread's OP was so fantastic, I'm necromancing it just to state the corollary: The more laissez-faire the GM is about encounters, the less like PvP the game is, and thus the less important balance becomes.
A GM who creates enemies mostly by their own whim, 5e-style, doesn't need to worry as much about the rules being balanced. A GM who designs encounters the way Pathfinder encourages them to—building each NPC according to a set of "fair" guidelines—does.
Of course, one might ask why the laissez-faire GM bothers with Pathfinder when a system like 5e is much more friendly towards that "the monster's HP are set at whatever make the encounter the most fun" playstyle.
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This thread's OP was so fantastic, I'm necromancing it...
And what a delicious necro it is! Though six years is a lot of black onyx to spend...
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I don't pay no union dues.
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I don't pay no union dues.
There's no dues required! We're a network of like-minded individuals who support unliving rights and the normalization of necromancy.
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I don't pay no union undues either!
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I don't pay no union undues either!
"Kobolds, man."
*Freezeframe, sitcom music plays*
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It is interesting to read through necro’d threads. This one has many familiar arguments so perhaps I read it when it was originally posted six years ago.
I don’t agree with the premise of the opening post, in thirty plus years of gaming in dozens of different RPG systems I’ve rarely felt like it was character vs character or player vs player. In other words the mechanics are independent of the overarching goal.
As a thought experiment if you played monopoly where the goal was to make sure every player doubled their starting money within a time limit but the underlying mechanics were the same then you change it from player vs player to cooperative. There are modern board games that do just that, take familiar player vs player type mechanics and flip them on their head by simply changing the goal. The goal is what is important, not the mechanics. The genius of Gary Gygax was creating this revolutionary change in game philosophy.
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I don’t agree with the premise of the opening post, in thirty plus years of gaming in dozens of different RPG systems I’ve rarely felt like it was character vs character or player vs player. In other words the mechanics are independent of the overarching goal.
I find the premise difficult to argue against. Ashiel isn't saying Pathfinder is about Player Vs Player interactions within the party(Or more accurately Player Vs PlayerS), but is saying that TTRPGs(atleast the tactical ones and definitely D&D/Pathfinder) play out similarly to MMO PVP style combat. The relationship of the DM playing NPCs or monsters faithfully is nearly identical to PVP.
The extrapolation is that because of this paradigm, class balance matters since it determines threat and how enemies perceive you. The question further is "Should the DM play the enemies as intellectually honest as possible?" <-By that I mean playing NPCs or monsters as they are depicted. Do they softball or do enemies/NPCs just not do things despite having no real in-game reason to not? Just because a DM is rooting for their party(or atleast probably should be), doesn't make the game not PVP.
The classic example is the big full attack. A Creature full attacks and drops a PC on their 2nd attack into the negatives. Do they simply ignore the other 3 it could have? No one is adjacent so it's just wasting actions. Time is an abstraction so laying fully into a creature as they fall seems reasonable.
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I don’t agree with the premise of the opening post, in thirty plus years of gaming in dozens of different RPG systems I’ve rarely felt like it was character vs character or player vs player. In other words the mechanics are independent of the overarching goal.
I find the premise difficult to argue against. Ashiel isn't saying Pathfinder is about Player Vs Player interactions within the party(Or more accurately Player Vs PlayerS), but is saying that TTRPGs(atleast the tactical ones and definitely D&D/Pathfinder) play out similarly to MMO PVP style combat. The relationship of the DM playing NPCs or monsters faithfully is nearly identical to PVP.
The extrapolation is that because of this paradigm, class balance matters since it determines threat and how enemies perceive you. The question further is "Should the DM play the enemies as intellectually honest as possible?" <-By that I mean playing NPCs or monsters as they are depicted. Do they softball or do enemies/NPCs just not do things despite having no real in-game reason to not? Just because a DM is rooting for their party(or atleast probably should be), doesn't make the game not PVP.
The classic example is the big full attack. A Creature full attacks and drops a PC on their 2nd attack into the negatives. Do they simply ignore the other 3 it could have? No one is adjacent so it's just wasting actions. Time is an abstraction so laying fully into a creature as they fall seems reasonable.
The extrapolation is wrong because the underlying premise is false. D&D was designed as a cooperative game in shared storytelling, not as a competition between players. As far as I can tell Pathfinder follows the same philosophy. In no game I’ve played was a winner declared after the session. The wizard character may be significantly more powerful than the fighter but it is irrelevant because their goal is not to defeat the fighter, it is to cooperate with the fighter to overcome challenges set by the GM.
Whether individual GMs “softball” is an entirely unrelated issue, but in my opinion both PCs and NPCs tend to be unrealistically aggressive in games. No intelligent creature deliberately puts themselves into kill or be killed situations without very good reason. One of my favourite enemies are Tucker’s Kobolds, which are loosely inspired by the tactics of the Viet Cong. They fight to defend their home, they don’t go looking for trouble. They use scouts to gauge the strength of their enemy. They rely on traps and ambushes to vanquish foes and run away at the first sign of any real danger. At all times survival is their first priority, they may take the opportunity to kill a downed foe, but only if doing so poses no danger to themselves.
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I’m all for giving the fighter extra abilities, not so much for balance reasons, more to make them more interesting.
I’m prepared to accept that for some gaming tables Pathfinder feels like players are in competition with each other in the sense that weaker characters have less agency than more powerful ones. The powerful wizard might hog the limelight over the lowly fighter even though they are supposed to cooperate. In those cases players could agree with each other on guidelines for character builds that keep characters more or less equivalent. But, I suspect that for every table that wants equivalent classes there is a table that likes the power disparity and the challenges that presents.
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This treat is a very interessting read and I want to put in my two cents.
For me (I'm primary DMing), P&P RPGs are not PvP games.
First because the players have to play together to survive/achiev their goals, no matter how powerfull one player is, he will not be able to complete an adventure which is designed for a group on it's own (simply because of action economy and the different challenges to overcome).
Sure some classes are stronger in specific situations (or on the paper) then others, but as they players (normally) doesn't fight against each other, this doesn't matter.
Also as it's a roleplay (and no roll-play) the players ideas and character play are often more important (then the rolls/stats) in determinate the outcome of an encounter.
Second as a DM I'm not playing against my players. I simply "run the world" their adventure take part in. This means I play their allys and enemies, but neither of them will "meta-game" or act outside of character. This means they sometime will not take the most "effective" action and also flee/surrender if the situation demands it.
I always try to mimic the enemies personality in their fighting tactics/styles - Animals fight different then undead then guards.
As a DM I'm not there to "Win" instead my goal is to set the stage for the characters to shine and have a good time.
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The extrapolation is wrong because the underlying premise is false... The wizard character may be significantly more powerful than the fighter but it is irrelevant because their goal is not to defeat the fighter, it is to cooperate with the fighter to overcome challenges set by the GM.
I think the premise was:
The game is player-controlled-PCs versus GM-controlled-NPCs, and the GM is also a player, therefore it is player versus player.
The GM is controlling intelligent entities that are trying to win the fight (like PvP), rather than dumb entities that follow predictable patterns (like videogame PvE), so has a duty to play to win.
(...therefore, class balance because reasons.)
The main flaw with this premise is that it's confusing, or possibly just silly.
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Actually, there is another dimension to this: Pathfinder has a very unusual assumption, fairly unique to Third Edition D&D, that all non-monster NPCs are built using the same rules as PCs (and monsters have their own rules). It's what the CR system depends on. That's why class balance is more relevant than people often realize—the evil wizard that the party encounters has the exact same resources as a wizard PC, meaning class balance is going to massively shape how this encounter play out.
In other words, it's why you can never make a default fighter the final boss in an adventure and expect anything exciting or challenging to come of it. Unless you're very good at designing complex fighter characters and optimizing them accordingly, the first thing the PCs will do is cast create pit and there's often literally nothing he can do about it.
This is a simplification, of course, and you can poke some holes in it, but the core is, I think, a good-faith effort at explaining a dynamic people often neglect. The GM designs many enemies the same way a player designs PCs, just with a bit more control over the circumstances those enemies will be encountered in.
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Better class balance for PCs probably wouldn't fix class balance for NPCs villains. The balancing factor of Wizards is that, unlike Fighters, they can become weak over the course of the adventuring day as they use up all their high-level spell slots. That doesn't translate into a weakness that applies to villains who are only around for one battle.
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Well, everyone becomes weak over the course of the adventuring day. 9-level casters actually have a lot of advantages there, with countless buffs that last the entire standard-length adventuring day and, at later levels, more spell slots and spell-trigger items than they know what to do with. It's very rare to see adventuring days that last more than 3-4 encounters, let alone more than 5-10 ingame minutes.
There's a reason why a lot of games basically did away with that "balancing" element entirely with buffs to cantrips and the like. In practice, it only really applies 20% of the time, and that's assuming a GM who really changes things up a lot with overland travel and the like. It's just a really unreliable way to balance a class, even putting aside that wizards can literally make scrolls.
That said, we're treading dangerously close to retreading Martial v. Caster Disparity arguments that were basically resolved ten times over five years ago.
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Sure, you can "cheat". You aren't really playing a system that's designed for it, though. That's an approach that matches 5e or similar games a lot better. And it's also not the point of this thread—I think OP was pretty clear that they were talking about how Pathfinder was designed, and not how individual GMs might choose to modify Pathfinder to fit their table. By all means, mod it however you want! I sure do!
However, with regards to the Pathfinder system designed by Paizo: Pathfinder is designed, for better or worse, for the GM to follow very similar and steady rules. It sort of creates an assumption of "fairness", that everyone's following roughly the same system of balance—an assumption that PCs get to invoke in-game. "Don't worry, Fighter, the NPC Wizard probably can't cast that many more spells after all those summons! Don't worry, Rogue, the NPC barbarian will be tired after exiting his rage!"
Choosing to break those rules should be done with care, and with a lot of attention paid to keeping the players informed, "Hey, the rules are being bent here with purpose, not just because it's convenient for me."
If I tell the players, "No, barbarians can't choose to maneuver or flank while raging," they're going to feel cheated if I then have an orc barbarian NPC start performing complex maneuvers. It's not that that's bad GMing, it's that Pathfinder has a sort of "good faith" assumption at play.
You might say it's dumb, or overly restrictive. It may not fit your style—it sure doesn't always fit mine. But it is what the entirety of Third Edition was designed for, and I think it has meaningful charms. PCs and NPCs having a sense of "equal footing" creates interesting encounters and makes the PCs feel like they're a part of the world, instead of special little demigods who are stuck with their own separate rules system from everyone else.
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I don't see why adding abilities isn't playing the system as intended.
The published adventures (mostly) don't do that. If there's an evil human fighter ruling a fortress, they don't give him flight, Spell Resistance and an arbitrary +5 to all saves (on top of the usual bonuses from his gear) to make it less likely he'll be rendered helpless in the first round of combat. They'll create a PC, give him a basic stat array and an unusual item or two, and leave him to it.
It's not a bad idea for the GM to give him some 'cheat' abilities, but it's not the default expectation.
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The guy ruling the fortress is just a guy except when he isn't.
Special/boss npcs aren't above getting templated or having some unique ritual effect going on in the background which is the same thing as bolting on bottom text when you get down to it.
For all intents and purposes PCs are not going to be half dragons, broken souls, or be under the Hell's Harvest Ritual (or whatever) so we're back to no parity because someone along the way decided that their boss fighter needed a bit of spice.
And while I'm thinking about it lack of parity doesn't need to be strictly about personal abilities too.
While I have Hell's Rebels on the mind, one npc is a basic cavalier (no bottom text or templates) but his mount is a full on wyvern (and not a janky archtype wyvern, the bestiary one). Certainly not an option for PCs there which is its own type of lack of parity.
One of my PCs beat the wyvern into submission and took it as their mount. They don't realize that wyvern is still plotting their death.
In seriousness though, both sides are kinda right. There are monster building rules that aren't just Calvinball like 5e is, but often don't apply to the PCs. The GM has a tremendous toolkit, but unlike other systems, there's a metric (even if imperfect) to determine the creation of NPCs and monsters.
I actually really like the monster and npc creation rules in Starfinder for this reason, even though the core game is a bit hit or miss.