There is a thought that grew bigger and bigger in my mind over the last couple of days. A lot of the reactions that are positive about the changes that the new edition will bring are about problems that will be solved with the new mechanics. most of those problems I never witnessed or didn't perceive them as problems, but, it looks like those problems seem to be most noticable in organized play.
- 'wand spamming' wascalled out as one problem, and yes, I can see how in organized play, wher it can't be ensured that dedicated healers are in the group every week, this could be seen as a viable solution to the lack of otherhealing options.
- 'forcing players into the dedicated healer role': this is something that I only read about, since I cannot understand how, in a home game, where you play with your friends, someone would be forced or bullied into a role he or she doesn't feel comfortable with. so I have to assume that this again is a problem more often encountered in organized play
- 'Cha 7 dump stat characters', seems to me to be a byproduct of the point buy system, which again, is a necessity of organized play, I assume. I understand the reasons behind point buy when one has to guarantee that all characters that drop in and out of the game any given week and can be played at any PFS table are largely build around the same guidelines. I'm not sure how popular point buy outside of PFS society is (I did notice however, it seems popular on these boards), but I've never seen it used in home games. so the perceived necessity to build Cha 7 characters might not be as strong in home games as it is when you play with your own circle of friends.
- 'streamlined action economy': as I understand it, PFS games follow a time limit and the modules have to be finished after a certain amount of hours, so time is more of a factor there than it is at home games, where a lot of time is spend on ordering chinese food or pizza or just chatting about what happend last week inthe lives of your friends and where the players might actively use the time they're out of turn to look something up or whatever players do. If the fight scene turns out too long somehow, well, one can always end the session 30 minutes later or cut right there, make a quick picture of the battle map and drop right back into action next session. time is not as important as it might be in PFS.
- 'oversimplifications of the XP mechanics': I had a little "Aha!" momen of enlightment yesterday evening, where I thought "So THAT'S why!", but I honestly can't remember what it was. I just remember that I thought that therewas good reason to believe that it would make life for organized play GMs easier than it was before. (If I somehow remember while I can still edit the post, of course I will)
- there might also be a case made for simpler monster creation rules, but I haven't yet figured out why, since I don't think GMs in PFS are encouraged to create their own monsters. Maybe someone smarter than me might explain it to me.
- I'm pretty sure, I'm forgetting a lot of things
So, long post short, my question here is: Is PF2 more of a reaction of the needs and faults of organized play than it is of the needs of home games? How big is the influence of organized play on the design of the new system?
And please, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to blame somebody and I DO understand how something like the PFS is needed for those who can't find or organize RPG groups otherwise. I just try to understand where design choices that are far away of my perception of how the game is played might come from and why and where there seems to be a need for it
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It's true that the things you say are present in PFS, with the exception of creating monsters since that's not the focus of pfs.
In home games, these things still come up, and sometimes it's because groups play pfs and home games in combination.
The system is yet to be fully revealed, but I'll be looking at this stuff when I can play the full system. Without it, all there really is to do is argue with people on the internet about it :)
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There is a thought that grew bigger and bigger in my mind over the last couple of days. A lot of the reactions that are positive about the changes that the new edition will bring are about problems that will be solved with the new mechanics. most of those problems I never witnessed or didn't perceive them as problems, but, it looks like those problems seem to be most noticable in organized play.
- 'wand spamming' wascalled out as one problem, and yes, I can see how in organized play, wher it can't be ensured that dedicated healers are in the group every week, this could be seen as a viable solution to the lack of otherhealing options.
The thing with wand spamming in PFS is not that ensuring dedicated healers is quite that impossible; it's that wands are just that cheap, and that good.
Starting each encounter fully healed makes the game massively easier. The cheap wands in PFS make this quite easy. Not only that, they provide relief if you take much more damage than anticipated. A healing cleric might be good enough in some games, but some adventures or encounters are uncommonly hard (or everyone rolls crap) and you suddenly need to heal much more than normal. At that point anyone except a dedicated healer is in trouble. But with wands, they're not in trouble. Because a typical wand contains about 275hp worth of healing and people can afford them from level 1 onwards.
Interestingly, it's just the CLW wand; the higher healing spells are much more expensive. Consider them in terms of gp per hp:
light 2.7 gp / hp
moderate 7.5 gp / hp
serious 12.2 gp / hp
critical 16.8 gp / hp
I've seen dedicated healers in PFS; I play one myself. It's not a redundant role, but it doesn't become really interesting until level 5 or so. By then your healing spells heal much more than the CLW wand per casting, and damage in combat can come hard enough that spike healing becomes needed. Monsters also start inflicting more exotic conditions than simple damage, and a party cleric that can remove blindness, confusion, curses, poison and ability damage is a big asset.
However, making it to the level where playing a healer becomes fun, takes some stamina.
- 'forcing players into the dedicated healer role': this is something that I only read about, since I cannot understand how, in a home game, where you play with your friends, someone would be forced or bullied into a role he or she doesn't feel comfortable with. so I have to assume that this again is a problem more often encountered in organized play
This one actually predates PFS. Pathfinder already took big steps to eliminate the "dedicated healer" job by allowing clerics to swap other spells for cure spells, so a cleric can have lots of fun spells which turn into healing spells when really needed. Instead of the rest of your party guilting you into only preparing spells that can save their life.
So no, this isn't a PFS issue, and was already solved.
- 'Cha 7 dump stat characters', seems to me to be a byproduct of the point buy system, which again, is a necessity of organized play, I assume. I understand the reasons behind point buy when one has to guarantee that all characters that drop in and out of the game any given week and can be played at any PFS table are largely build around the same guidelines. I'm not sure how popular point buy outside of PFS society is (I did notice however, it seems popular on these boards), but I've never seen it used in home games. so the perceived necessity to build Cha 7 characters might not be as strong in home games as it is when you play with your own circle of friends.
Point buy systems were popular even outside organized play because not everyone enjoys rolling. It's nice rolling high, but lame rolling low. Lots of people prefer everyone getting the same fair amount instead of the party being imbalanced from the start because one person rolled much better than another.
And stat dumping and point buy are not automatically connected; if you rolled so-so and have a bad stat, you still got to put it somewhere, and Charisma is for many classes just not relevant. So it's the obvious place to dump a badly rolled stat.
- 'streamlined action economy': as I understand it, PFS games follow a time limit and the modules have to be finished after a certain amount of hours, so time is more of a factor there than it is at home games, where a lot of time is spend on ordering chinese food or pizza or just chatting about what happend last week inthe lives of your friends and where the players might actively use the time they're out of turn to look something up or whatever players do. If the fight scene turns out too long somehow, well, one can always end the session 30 minutes later or cut right there, make a quick picture of the battle map and drop right back into action next session. time is not as important as it might be in PFS.
Combat taking too long and players getting burnt out on it was also a complaint in 3.5. While you may be fine with it, it's a drag for others.
The streamlining Paizo is going for seems to be about removing unneeded complexity. Just because it's complex doesn't mean it's better; having many options in combat doesn't mean you need many action types. A simpler set of action types that accommodate a wide variety of actions could make the system easier to use without giving up on tasty crunch.
- 'oversimplifications of the XP mechanics': I had a little "Aha!" momen of enlightment yesterday evening, where I thought "So THAT'S why!", but I honestly can't remember what it was. I just remember that I thought that therewas good reason to believe that it would make life for organized play GMs easier than it was before. (If I somehow remember while I can still edit the post, of course I will)
I would be surprised if "oversimplification" was ever a stated goal for anything.
PFS doesn't use the Pathfinder XP mechanics right now, and probably won't do so in V2 either.
Meanwhile, many people running adventure paths also don't use XP as a mechanic anymore at all but just level everyone up when they reach milestone parts of the story. This can be very liberating as a player because you're not tempted anymore to think "maybe we should drag our feet and grind a bit and level up before we go face the BBEG and rescue the princess".
- there might also be a case made for simpler monster creation rules, but I haven't yet figured out why, since I don't think GMs in PFS are encouraged to create their own monsters. Maybe someone smarter than me might explain it to me.
Yes and no. The current monster generation system is schizophrenic. On the one hand it has a table saying "a monster with these sorts of stats is about CR X", and on the other hand it has templates saying "applying this to a CR Y monster adds 1 CR". However, you can easily use those templates to make a monster that going by the first table is way scarier than its CR indicates.
And that does happen occasionally in PFS scenarios, because they tend to be outlined as "you should have an APL+3 encounter here" and the writer then squeezes a lot more scariness out of the monster by playing tricks with templates.
The simplified monster creation system is supposed to give us several benefits:
- Easier for the GM to make his own monsters
- You start by determining how scary CR you want your monster to be, and then you derive the appropriate numbers. So you're not fooling people by making monsters scarier than they ought to be for that CR. CR is a diagnostic/measuring tool for designing appropriately difficult encounters, not a budget that you try to get maximum scare value out of.
These are nice things for PFS, but also for everyone else.
- I'm pretty sure, I'm forgetting a lot of thingsSo, long post short, my question here is: Is PF2 more of a reaction of the needs and faults of organized play than it is of the needs of home games? How big is the influence of organized play on the design of the new system?
I think it's a mix of both. PFS does distort some game elements, and it's a big lens from which the game system is viewed and reported upon. But most developers at Paizo also play/GM in regular campaigns and get that perspective too.
And please, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to blame somebody and I DO understand how something like the PFS is needed for those who can't find or organize RPG groups otherwise. I just try to understand where design choices that are far away of my perception of how the game is played might come from and why and where there seems to be a need for it
I suspect your game group is not average. Which is fine, in any population most members are not typical.
PFS, with its standardized rules, of course creates a bigger group of people with similar game experiences, and that's going to have an influence. Still, PFS isn't played the same way everywhere either. Here in the Netherlands we seem to have a quite different mood than some of the stories I hear from the US.
But I do want to point out: PFS is not just a substitute because we can't have other kinds of campaigns. It's a campaign I genuinely enjoy on its own merits :)
PFS is a great gateway into the hobby. I think its good for Paizo to consider a rule system that works well in an organized environment. Home games, after all, can and will be house ruled. Though I dont follow the premise of the OP since I agree with many of the changes and no longer participate in PFS. Those observations are purely anecdotal.
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The major contention seems to be that only the people who are socially unacceptable for home groups or are too busy otherwise, are the ones playing PFS. Or that PFS has ruined Pathfinder with its many FAQ's that seem to nerf cool options because of complaints from PFS.
The first contention is not true. I have two home groups I play with, and have loved many and most of the people I've met through PFS and would be honored to home group game with them. Indeed one group I'll be starting up a home game with, I met through PFS. There are toxic people in all types of groups, its just you might hear about it more in PFS because its a forward facing campaign with over 100,000 active players in 40+ countries that all converse about the game in a central location and essentially play the same exact scenarios the same way.
PFS is a huge marketing campaign for the company. Its used to help sell their product, and its extremely successful at doing so, or they wouldn't keep adding to the organized play team. I believe now it has 4 Developers, which is huge compared to when I started in 2011 when Mark Moreland was playing double duty as Developer and Coordinator.
As such, ignoring the "playtest" information they get through organized play would simply be folly. Indeed, many of the class playtests they've done have had a huge PFS component that allowed them to get tons more feedback on how the classes play and potential action economy and balance issues than you would have otherwise due to the 5 encounter and done nature of PFS.
You can fix any broken part of the game at home easily, it's a big rigmarole to fix anything in PFS. You'll find every abuse in the book and the GM is not allowed to do anything about it.
I don't see what's wrong in making a game that is great when played by RAW. At least it has motivated the designers to tighten up the balance and ability texts. Plus, if you don't use those exploitable mechanics, then it shouldn't affect you much that they got changed.
This one actually predates PFS. Pathfinder already took big steps to eliminate the "dedicated healer" job by allowing clerics to swap other spells for cure spells, so a cleric can have lots of fun spells which turn into healing spells when really needed. Instead of the rest of your party guilting you into only preparing spells that can save their life.
Yay other dedicated healers!
It was actually D&D 3.0e that gave us that, and it was still in 3.5e when it was copied over to Pathfinder. A very welcome change over 2e.
D&D 5e doesn't support it anymore, but it's not really necessary with their arcanist-style magics.
Yeah most of those things aren't true about PFS or aren't the reason for things.
Wands, they are the most popular way (on the forums at least) to heal up, PFS or not, Cleric or not. Wands don't force anyone to be a healer which is point to.
Forced to be a healer, this is much more of a home game thing than PFS if wands didn't exist. In PFS it's random parties and many people don't build healers. In a home game with 4 players it's a race. "I call wizard, Dibs on barb, dibs on rogue! Okay dude our party needs a cleric for the healing. But I wanted to be a bard... Well we REALLY need a healing cleric since none of the other four are a healing cleric." Where now with wands it's, "A bard? Cool they can use wands so we have HP healing covered."
dump stats is just going with point buy. It's optimized to be worse at a few skills you're already bad at to be better at things you actually care about. Nothing about PFS causes dump stats.
the "streamlining" I'm not actually seeing. If anything I think there are more choices and options for people in version 2 than version 1 and thus it's fights will take longer.
EXP is not a thing in PFS, you just get 1 every mission and level up after getting 3.
Monster rules are also not a thing in PFS. The mission has the monsters in them that the GM uses and can't change.
PFS is closest to a game by the rules as there are few house rules outside of banning options. In home games the Table can decide that they can't use wands outside of combat and thus prevent wand spamming if they don't like wand spamming. But I've not seen anything in any of the version 2 material that I'd say was caused by PFS.