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I am not a game designer, nor do I have a keen eye for balance. I am, however, able to notice what annoys me about Pathfinder 1e, and I hope that Paizo is taking steps to address it:
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1. Content aggregation and ease of understanding. AKA, "Pathfinder is too Bloated."
1e might have ended up too bloated, but it was exacerbated with the opaqueness of purpose. Simply put: Nobody had any idea what most of the options were for. In most cases, a lot of characters suffered simply due to the fact that they had ignored a lot of what their choices were designed to lead them down.
What paizo needs to do is build a codified core, designed and built to allow players to gaze at a feat and understand if it is something they would be interested in. If they do not put in the time and effort to do that, within 5 years 2e will be as bloated as 1e was.
A common method to approach this concept would be to split a lot of the character choices into one of three categories, and explain that players should select two to build upon. The Forge of Combat provides a nice explanation on three categories that would make a lot of sense: Hammer, Anvil, and Arm. Presuming that Paizo builds each class in such a way that such versatility is possible, it will increase ease of understanding, and drastically lower the difficulty in building characters.
This does not preclude complexity, however, nor hamstring people into certain classes.
2. Establishment of versatile, cross-class, and exchangeable abilities.
While many people decry magic for being incredibly unbalanced, many presume that shooting magic in the foot will make this problem of unbalance go away. It won't, simply due to how magic is designed. This can be broken down on three fronts: Cross-Compatibility, Adaptability, and Ease of Understanding.
Magic is Cross-Compatable; A single spell, once developed, can be distributed to dozens of spellcasters. Abjuring step can be cast by an alchemist, arcanist, bard, investigator, magus, occultist, psychic, skald, Sorcerer, and Wizard. Creating a single spell can increase the options of half a dozen classes, and as such, it is economical.
A Rogue Talent is useful only for a single class. As such, it is not as economical. An Investigator Talent is used only by one class. Many options that could be used by multiple classes, increasing general utility, are instead locked into a single class.
Magic is Adaptable; A single spell is not a game-defining choice, nor does it deny you the option of an important, heavily required feat. Chokehold takes up two feats, and up to 3/4ths of a 7th level characters feats. [url=http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/a/aboleth-s-lung/]Aboleth's Lung[/b] requiers a 2nd level spell slot and *Perhaps* Heighten Spell. 1/14th of a character's spell slots, and perhaps 1/4th their feats if they focus on it.
Magic is easy to understand: A spell does not have to abide by the laws of physics. It does not have to listen to how gravity works, or explain itself. Nothing of the sort is required. Bladed Dash is something that could happen if fast enough, but is limited to only Spellcasters. To my knowledge, no similar ability exists for Mundane characters. Because it doesn't seem "Realistic" enough.
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So my question with Paizo is: What are they doing to resolve these issues? What does 5e do to either remove the problems with magic or enhance martial characters to make each character more viable? Does anyone know?
In my eyes, if they implement structural changes to allow martial options to be output at a similar level to Magical options, then we're probably golden on this edition. If they do not, this edition has about 5 years. But I'm not an expert, and I'd like to hear what you have to say.
1. In theory could work and simplify chargen. The implementation was very restrictive in 4E. So hopefully not like that.
2. Sounds like there will be only 4 spell lists in PF2. The spell levels have also been extended to 10. Other than that, I cant comment on anything i've read to your magic requests.
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I have similar concerns, but I approach them slightly differently. Or at least I perceive the problems coming from a slightly different direction. The bloat is not about economy of ability use throughout the system. I'll explain below:
Why the bloat?
For several reasons:
- They imported a lot of v3.5 and made a ton of subtle modifications and omissions for brevity, but did not look throughout the rules to see where those omissions might affect other legacy v3.5 rules that were imported. As such, there are a lot of places where rules either don't make sense or directly contradict other rules, because a sentence was removed in a companion rule from an earlier chapter.
- There was no rules bible created. How should all combat feats be written to ensure ease of understanding and use in the system? Some of this is because of above, where feats were imported directly and not modified to make sense with new rules sets. How should all attack spells be written to ensure they make sense with the rules of combat? With initiative? With action economy? As Paizo (as any company does) has turnover and designers move on, developers move on, and freelancers move on, concept and design changes; understanding of how the rules are intended to work changes. And we see this largely in the companion and campaign lines. Where developers seem to be developing with their individual pools of trusted freelancers and either they understand the rules differently than the designers, other developers or the vast majority of the player base, or they aren't carefully vetting the freelancers' work. So we see a lot of rules elements (feats, spells, archetypes that have a lot of compatibility issues. Either they don't work well with the rules set as a whole and lots of clarification is needed, or they have unintended conflicts/interactions with other rules elements that make that item explode into ridiculous power. A central rules bible that all designers, developers, and freelancers will be beholden to, will help to ensure things are at least written similarly across all product.
- Sean K. Reynolds once wrote in a message board discussion, that the rules are written to be interesting to read. They are written with creative writing in mind. His opinion was that nobody wants to read through a rulebook that's just dry technical writing. He left no room for the possibility of combining technical writing concepts with creative writing. Each mechanical item needs to make sure that all the explanation of how it interacts with the rules is written with technical writing concepts using the Comprehensive Rules Bible to do so. Each Feat, Spell, Ability, etc. can use creative writing to describe it. But when it comes to writing the rule, keywords are paramount. Don't use synonyms for standard action or attack action just because you are tired of writing "standard action" 27 bazillion times. Keywords should be compiled in the rules bible.
- They do not really empower their editors to comprehensively ensure rules compatibility across all lines of product. One of several reasons for this. The developers are constantly touting the expertise and proficiency of their editing team. So a few things might be happening here. a) the team might not be tasked with ensuring rules compatibility, b) the team might be given the "for editing" drafts with such a tight time window that they literally don't have time to truly edit or give a red line back to the developer, or c) the team is not at least the 2nd most knowledgeable about all the rules of the game. The editing team needs to at least be the 2nd most knowledgeable group of people on the game rules and they need to hold the developing and design teams to task for not following the keywords, rules bible, and technical writing concepts. I say 2nd most, because hopefully the design team would be the most knowledgeable because they are creating the game itself. But understandably, they may be, in many cases, creating the basis for an idea, fleshing it out somewhat, and then turning it over to a developer or freelancer. (There was a great post somewhere in the PFS boards regarding the job description of Designer/Developer/Freelancer by Mark Siefter.) And I've seen Jason Buhlman and Sean K Reynolds make comments that there are so many rules and the book is 500 pages long, that there is no way they can remember all the nuances of all the rules all the time. So realistically, the editing team, who's job it would be to know all the nuances (or at least know there is potentially a nuance and where to look up that nuance for double checking), could (should?) be the most knowledgeable about the rules set. This is not to say that the current editing team is not doing a good job at the job they are tasked to do. But with the many errors we've seen in recent books, there is a breakdown in editing somewhere. I'm guessing its a timing and tasking issue. So make sure the project management is done in such a way that editors have the requisite time to actually edit for rules compatibility and task (give authority to?) the excellent editors to do just that.
- Ensure that all rules elements of a particular thing are all in the same place. Or at most two places with a (see page xx) clause leading me to that other place. This goes to the first item above.
If I can find all the rules I need either with it all being in the same paragraph or chapter, or a tag that tells me where else to find more rules, specifically by page number, not just chapter, it will go a long way to helping mastery of the rules. I have about 7 years of rules mastery in Pathfinder, and 10 years of 3.0/3.5 mastery prior to that, and 16 years of AD&D rules mastery prior to that,
and there are still rules I'm running across that are in some obscure place that I didn't know about. Solve that quixotic problem and it will go a long way to solving rules bloat and power creep.
tl;dr: If you create a rules bible with keywords, ensure all mechanical rules effects are written with technical writing styles, ensure all rules are centralized to the specific rule in question, and task your editing team to master the rules and edit for rules compatibility, you will see a lot less rules bloat and power creep.
Regarding 2: Doing this risks removing any meaningful distinction between classes. If modularity is a top-tier goal, at some point one might as well just use a classless system. They're quite fun.