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It seems they made dumping Charisma a hard choice by adding the new Resonance pool system.
As such, do you think they made steps to ensure that it's a tough choce to dump Strength either, for inter-ability balances? Assuming PF2 did so, what could have been added to Strength, oher than weapon hit/damage, Athletics, armor versatility and carrying capacity?
What I wish they did was throwing out strength and con and just replacing it with a single Physicality/Body stat that serves both functions. You could similarly do the same with Wis/Cha and just call it some pithy version of Willpower/Mental Strength while you're at it.
Microlite20 does that. The three stats are STR, DEX, and MIND. STR is STR+CON, DEX is.. DEX, and MIND is everything else.
It's actually a very elegant system.
Some of strength’s competition is getting nerfed.
Skills advance passively, so Int isn’t as vital for our-of-combat relevance, and there’s no more perception tax on your skills.
Dex is no longer the sole initiative stat.
More hitpoints mean that Con is no longer absolutely necessary. Especially true for martials, since their hp-per-level is now (probably) worth +2 Con mod over the old d8 classes, rather than +1, and +4 over d6 classes. With good fort saves, I think Con will actually be the safe-ish dump stat for martials that Wis was for Int/Cha casters.
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People in my groups were always dumping STR. THen I started tracking weight. They don't dump STR nearly as much anymore. It's pretty much the only mechanic that makes STR relevant for non-melee chars, so it can be troublesome when you "ignore it".
And no, bags of holding don't remove the need for strength. 8 STR guys REALLY can't carry anything! They are lucky if their weapon+armor doesn't exceed their light load.
Yup. Skills are indeed being neutered.
Yup. Skills are indeed being neutered.
Not what I said. Ending up with more than a +20 spread in skill modifier between party members means that there are no checks where that skill can be relevant to both characters. Instead of +20 spreads being the default in parties (sometimes between two characters with full ranks), those will be the outer limit now. The consequence for not investing in something most of the time is now you’re not good at it, rather than you automatically fail at it.
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Tarik - The other Microlite20 changes sort of work neatly, making it a simple three-way balance. A trinity of neatness.
It's a very very simple system though so I imagine people would get bored of it quickly.....
People in my groups were always dumping STR. THen I started tracking weight. They don't dump STR nearly as much anymore. It's pretty much the only mechanic that makes STR relevant for non-melee chars, so it can be troublesome when you "ignore it".
And no, bags of holding don't remove the need for strength. 8 STR guys REALLY can't carry anything! They are lucky if their weapon+armor doesn't exceed their light load.
Um, tell me about it. I have 10 str, and my weapons and medium armor put me right to the edge of being heavily encumbered. I can carry six more pounds of stuff...and the party has a cart which is carrying 19.5 lbs of stuff which is specifically mine (and also "party" shared goods).
We've always done encumbrance, but HeroLab and PCGen make it very easy nowadays.
four squares, four squares, four squares onwards.
Tarik - The other Microlite20 changes sort of work neatly, making it a simple three-way balance. A trinity of neatness.
It's a very very simple system though so I imagine people would get bored of it quickly.....
People in my groups were always dumping STR. THen I started tracking weight. They don't dump STR nearly as much anymore. It's pretty much the only mechanic that makes STR relevant for non-melee chars, so it can be troublesome when you "ignore it".
And no, bags of holding don't remove the need for strength. 8 STR guys REALLY can't carry anything! They are lucky if their weapon+armor doesn't exceed their light load.
Um, tell me about it. I have 10 str, and my weapons and medium armor put me right to the edge of being heavily encumbered. I can carry six more pounds of stuff...and the party has a cart which is carrying 19.5 lbs of stuff which is specifically mine (and also "party" shared goods).
We've always done encumbrance, but HeroLab and PCGen make it very easy nowadays.
four squares, four squares, four squares onwards.
Well, if you're a fat cleric in a tin can then you can comfortably hop onto medium encumbrance since it does kinda the same as Medium Armor. The people who are really limited by this are the DEX-to-damage guys that wanna retain their full mobility.
Carrying Capacity is more than enough to make STR relevant, I hope the Bulk system make it into PF2, makes tracking a lot easier.
On top of all the other examples everyone has said, as a general rule of thumb, at least in P1e, Strength builds tend to do more damage per round than Dexterity builds. Strength builds more easily incorporate Power Attack into their builds, and on top of being able to two-hand their weapons, they're able to reach higher damage modifiers faster. Dexterity builds have to make more accommodations and sacrifices to be able to reach damage modifiers as high as Strength builds can get with little to no investment, and this is without mentioning the damage dice of weapons.
Now that P2e is stripping Dexterity of some of it's universal power via Initiative, my prediction is that, while it will be somewhat easier to use Dexterity as an offensive stat (Rogues get dex-to-damage inherently if I'm hearing correctly), the general DPR advantage of Strength will remain, which at the end of the day just makes the two balanced and comparable, instead of one being generally superior to the other.
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Bending bars and lifting gates will be a key component of PF2 adventure design.
Well by using Bulk they actually made tracking encumbrance not a complete chore to do and as a consequence makes it possible to levy penelties for dumping strength so that's a sideways method to boost relevance. Other than that its probably just sitting around gatekeeping feats for other relevance.
What I wish they did was throwing out strength and con and just replacing it with a single Physicality/Body stat that serves both functions. You could similarly do the same with Wis/Cha and just call it some pithy version of Willpower/Mental Strength while you're at it.
That's something I'd like to see.
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Well, if you're a fat cleric in a tin can then you can comfortably hop onto medium encumbrance since it does kinda the same as Medium Armor. The people who are really limited by this are the DEX-to-damage guys that wanna retain their full mobility.
I'm not fat! T.T I'm 96 pounds. My gear weighs almost as much as I do!
My previous cleric was this crazy 4d6-drop-lowest-based system (from a DM who used to run for us, before he moved away to a scary realm known as You Knighted Steaks or something), and she had stats like..everywhere. She was lightly encumbered but carried more and wore heavy armor. We didn't do armor encumbrance back then either, so I was super fast.
My new cleric is built on a 20-ish point spend and I had nothing left over for STR and it made me very sad and almost heavily encumbered.. I feel so slow.. T.T
Wait.. I just realized I've fought like six major battles, and didn't have my armor in three of them. Maybe I should dump STR and go for light armor instead. That way I could sleep in it without that stupid endurance feat.
In Mummy's Mask our Dex warrior uses a mithril weapon...because he needed the lower weight. Since our other melee guy is Dex-based too and I play an old shaman with dumped Str, all of our loot goes on our cleric's battle lion companion. Just to move, I have had to drop metamagic rods after pulling them from my magic haversack. Thankfully, my familiar is strong enough to pick them up and carry them along after me. :)
So, yeah, strength matters.
GMing a group through a module now who were surprised encumbrance mattered in my games. When they came to the first big payoff, they assumed they weren't really supposed to get it because it weighed so much! Yes, they were able to carry it out encumbered.
I guess a bulk system would get more players on board with encumbrance, but I really hope PF2 does it better than Starfinder (otherwise I'll likely run it old school in my games).
Skills advance passively, so Int isn’t as vital for our-of-combat relevance
Good point. What are they going to do to punish everyone other than Wizards and Alchemists from dumping Int into the ground?
I guess a bulk system would get more players on board with encumbrance, but I really hope PF2 does it better than Starfinder (otherwise I'll likely run it old school in my games).
I think someone confirmed it is the same as Starfinder and that Starfinder actually got it from the PF2 stuff they were working on in secret.
Skills advance passively, so Int isn’t as vital for our-of-combat relevanceGood point. What are they going to do to punish everyone other than Wizards and Alchemists from dumping Int into the ground?
I'm also concerned about this, I hope Intelligence still affect skills in some way.
Skills advance passively, so Int isn’t as vital for our-of-combat relevanceGood point. What are they going to do to punish everyone other than Wizards and Alchemists from dumping Int into the ground?
You just don’t excel in as many skills, I presume.
You just don’t excel in as many skills, I presume.Skills advance passively, so Int isn’t as vital for our-of-combat relevanceGood point. What are they going to do to punish everyone other than Wizards and Alchemists from dumping Int into the ground?
The only thing I can think of is reducing the number of Proficiency upgrades you get, but that seems like a massive impact for just ability modifier. How good you are at all skills simultaneously advances automatically with level, so locking you out of Proficiency levels means a lot of restriction on what kinds of niche superhero b!$%+!$% that they've been hinting you can do with skills, and those things seem to be the ONLY focus of skills in PF2.
What I wish they did was throwing out strength and con and just replacing it with a single Physicality/Body stat that serves both functions. You could similarly do the same with Wis/Cha and just call it some pithy version of Willpower/Mental Strength while you're at it.Microlite20 does that. The three stats are STR, DEX, and MIND. STR is STR+CON, DEX is.. DEX, and MIND is everything else.
It's actually a very elegant system.
I always had a personal preference for Rolemaster. With 10 stats you got a lot more granularity in character capability.
Are you sure we can dump stats to begin with? I never played starfinder, but from the few things I have seen of it so far, dumping doesn’t give you additional points to spend on your attributes and I think they mentioned in the level up post that the point buy system of 2nd ed would be similar to the one in starfinder.
They said the ability score advancement as you level up would be the same as Starfinder. They haven't revealed anything about the initial generation of ability scores other than that it will be different from Starfinder with even higher ability scores.
They said the ability score advancement as you level up would be the same as Starfinder. They haven't revealed anything about the initial generation of ability scores other than that it will be different from Starfinder with even higher ability scores.
I think it’s higher tertiary scores- I don’t know that we’ve heard anything about primary ability scores yet.
Yeah, Mark pointed out you could have an 18 and not need to have 10 in everything else.
I always had a personal preference for Rolemaster. With 10 stats you got a lot more granularity in character capability.
I do like lots of stat customizations. I've never played Rolemaster. Is it fast?
They said the ability score advancement as you level up would be the same as Starfinder. They haven't revealed anything about the initial generation of ability scores other than that it will be different from Starfinder with even higher ability scores.
Well, whatever it is, I hope the default system avoids the 10-10-10 thing.. you know, where characters have a suspiciously large number of 10s in their stats?
It just feels...Artificial. I never noticed before as we used to do 4d6-style stuffs, which makes a more organic feeling character..but recently we switched to a 20-point buy, as it's more fair. No more 18/17/17/16/15/14 vs 13/12/10/9/7/4 characters. But the organic feeling left.
Bending bars and lifting gates will be a key component of PF2 adventure design.
Sigh! those were the days:-)
Well, I probably wouldn't want to go back, but the nostalgia is just so ...
They said the ability score advancement as you level up would be the same as Starfinder. They haven't revealed anything about the initial generation of ability scores other than that it will be different from Starfinder with even higher ability scores.Well, whatever it is, I hope the default system avoids the 10-10-10 thing.. you know, where characters have a suspiciously large number of 10s in their stats?
It just feels...Artificial. I never noticed before as we used to do 4d6-style stuffs, which makes a more organic feeling character..but recently we switched to a 20-point buy, as it's more fair. No more 18/17/17/16/15/14 vs 13/12/10/9/7/4 characters. But the organic feeling left.
We use 4d6, reroll 1s and 2s, drop lowest. That results in a possible range of 9 to 18 before racial modifiers (since the lowest roll is three 3s). We can also roll up to 3 different arrays of 6 numbers and pick which set we want. Sure, it can result in some high stats, but it means it's very unlikely someone is stuck with a crippled character and avoids the point-buy issue of either gaming the stats or feeling guilty that you didn't.