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I want the game to be equally playable with four fighters as a cleric-fighter-rogue-wizard combo, or any other combo.
I want every player to be able to play what he wants, when he wants, without having to worry about 'plugging holes' or 'filling roles'.
I don't want anybody 'getting stuck' playing something they don't want to because 'the game' makes it necessary.
Does anybody else agree with this?
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Disagree. But I think Paizo is developing range of ability sources independent of class (e.g. Deity of worship, advanced skills) which may make party class composition LESS a potential issue of contention, particularly if several of these other avenues are exploited. But class will remain a major component of that, which makes sense when classes in a class-based game system are the primary means to define special things you can do, and most parties desire certain balance or broadness in things they can do. That isn't strictly universal, people speak of "condition removal" and such as "required", yet in certain campaigns you won't need to face enemies inflicting all those conditions, so they're not really necessary for that campaign.
EDIT: Damn it! Ninja'd by "No." So unfair!
EDIT2: I don't know if I would expect anything FUNDAMENTALLY so different than what you can achieve in Pathfinder 1st Edition. Where you can pretty easily have non-Full BAB character like Inquisitor or Oracle fill "frontliner" role. A class with 2nd rate healing + healing focused archetype/Feats can fill "healer" role. A class with 2nd rate arcane type spells + archetype/feats expanding arcane spell access can fill "arcane" role. If another character ALSO partly fills the role, it's even easier to achieve "non traditional" balanced party. Simply the array of "hybrid" classes tends to be able to fill more than one role at least viably if not masterfully.
But the game is about a collective narrative. It is not about non-cooperative lone wolfs choosing their builds in complete isolation and getting thrown together randomly and calling that fun and success. If playing in a social cooperative manner is not working, then nothing Paizo does can change that.
RPGs are like action movies, the special forces team assembled to save the day. Those don't work with characters who all have identical capabilities, who all want to be the stunt driver or whatever. They need an A-Team of varied capabilities, the face, the muscle, the brains, etc. That's just the name of the game, everybody understands this. This is why your complaint is hedged in mechanics instead of narrative, nobody begs for Paizo to enable narratives where heroes all have identical undifferentiated skill sets.
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It would be pretty fun if the ancestry/class/skill/general feats allows for a whole group of a single non-full caster class which works effectively.
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It's a desirable goal, but the rules you'd have to add to make four Fighters be exactly as capable of solving problems as a Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard party would probably have a negative impact on the game.
If the players make the same character four times (and if they're not co-ordinated enough to pick four different classes, they probably won't take the time ensure they have a good diversity of Fighter types either) then you have a party that is innately less flexible. No-one can disarm traps or pick locks. No-one is good at diplomacy or stealth or disguises. No-one can dispel magic or fly or see invisible.
This means that they will likely come across a problem sooner or later that they are woefully unprepared for, unless the adventure consists of nothing but orc-killing.
You can certainly aim to reduce the scale of the problem (like allowing Fighters to heal outside of combat, or gain access to wands that give them commonly needed magic abilities) but you can't eliminate it without making everything homogeneous.
It would be pretty fun if the ancestry/class/skill/general feats allows for a whole group of a single non-full caster class which works effectively.
That would be great, and in its own way it would make magic special again, going from "it's nice i guess, everything else is subpar" to "magic", hopefully without going for magic=moar dice.
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?
*sigh*
I think I reached a point where I start blaming video games. oh, and rap music. and those hipster man-buns for whatever reason. also: Carthage
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?
*sigh*
I think I reached a point where I start blaming video games. oh, and rap music. and those hipster man-buns for whatever reason. also: Carthage
It does always seem to go back to Carthage...
I'm for giving mundanes a chance to be more useful than meatshields and trapfinders...
EDIT: by the way a conjurer can easily do those things with summon monster
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?
*sigh*
I think I reached a point where I start blaming video games. oh, and rap music. and those hipster man-buns for whatever reason. also: Carthage
That’s not what the OP was talking about at all.
A group of fighters can cooperate.
A group of two rogues, a ranger and a bard can cooperate.
Sometimes a family is 3 Rogues and their Sorcerer son.
They are saying they want the game to be playable without all four archetypes being represented in a single party.
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While a pleasant idea, it is also self-destructive, because it means either that all classes have the access to the same abilities or challenges set by the GM always require the same set of skills the party already has.
So if you are a party of 4 fighters, only thing you face are different gauntlets of climbing walls and swimming real good.
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I want the exact opposite, where you'll sometimes miss any class you don't have, because all the classes bring something unique and exceptional which isn't easily replaced by another class.
Mandatory 12-person party, coming up! ;)
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?
Why wouldn't their be social cooperation and coordinated problem solving? If anything there would be More of that in a "non-balanced party" game since the party members will need to be more careful in choosing their Ancestry, Class Feats, and Skills to try and cover all the necessary areas and reduce wasted overlap.
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?Why wouldn't their be social cooperation and coordinated problem solving? If anything there would be More of that in a "non-balanced party" game since the party members will need to be more careful in choosing their Ancestry, Class Feats, and Skills to try and cover all the necessary areas and reduce wasted overlap.
The original poster doesn't want to have to consider any other character in the party in their decisions: "I want every player to be able to play what he wants, when he wants, without having to worry about 'plugging holes' or 'filling roles'."
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so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?Why wouldn't their be social cooperation and coordinated problem solving? If anything there would be More of that in a "non-balanced party" game since the party members will need to be more careful in choosing their Ancestry, Class Feats, and Skills to try and cover all the necessary areas and reduce wasted overlap.
Um ... you mean having a ‘balanced party’?
I tend to prefer the game to steer the party towards variety.
Firstly everyone isn’t fighting over the same treasure.
Secondly as a DM I can pose a wider set of challenges
Thirdly as a player it’s not very nice to design a two weapon wielding ranger only to find out another player is also running a two weapon wielding ranger, and you the. Won’t get chance to shine when the tracking come up.
A conversation beforehand is the way to go, and this is encouraged by the system being designed around a balanced group.
That said parties should be able to overlap skills - no reason why a ranger couldn’t be 66% as good at trapfindimg as a rogue say. And a rogue be 66% as good as a fighter in combat.
What I am dead set against is the need for someone to have to provide dedicated healing for the party. P should change the healing mechanic like 5e to can the CLW wand problem and allow clerics to spend more time spreading the word of god Andy less time burning through cure spells.
In an eberron game i'm playing in we managed to avoid the need of a dedicated healer (and of other fullcasters) through extensive use of wands, scrolls and potions thanks to my artificer and the rogue using UMD.
The original poster doesn't want to have to consider any other character in the party in their decisions: "I want every player to be able to play what he wants, when he wants, without having to worry about 'plugging holes' or 'filling roles'."
I was putting more focus on "being able to play any class you want" part. I should have spoken with a lot more clarity than I did.
The original poster doesn't want to have to consider any other character in the party in their decisions: "I want every player to be able to play what he wants, when he wants, without having to worry about 'plugging holes' or 'filling roles'."so you're not a fan of social cooperation and coordinated problem solving then? You know, the backbones of RPGs?Why wouldn't their be social cooperation and coordinated problem solving? If anything there would be More of that in a "non-balanced party" game since the party members will need to be more careful in choosing their Ancestry, Class Feats, and Skills to try and cover all the necessary areas and reduce wasted overlap.
I know I do. And by your tone, unless, the internet has miraculously once again made it hard to determine, you don't.
I do want for the party members to meet quite by chance, and gosh looky, they aren't everything a wholesome breakfast should provide for a day's nutritional requirements. They just happened not to be every role covered or needed. Maybe they should all give up and go home or wait until a walking CLW stick-person walks along. Maybe not every game, but once in a while. Or sure, every time.
Can the developers design around the unbalanced party? I don't think they can as well as they might making baseline assumptions about a balanced party. Should they? I don't think so - those of us who want pariah level unbalanced parties will struggle through enjoying our tone-deaf pursuits and largely enjoying it.
RPGs are not, to me, a team game, they are a game of playing roles, and the expectation of what the outcome is is as myriad as there are those who play them.
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Sounds like what Wow (World of warcraft) has been steadily trying to do over the years. I have mixed feelings about this.
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RPGs are not, to me, a team game, they are a game of playing roles
ideally, they're both at the same time.
unless they are video games of course, in which case, they are neither| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't think we should be "forced" to play a fighter, a rogue, a wizard and a cleric. Fortunately, I don't think the Devs want it either.
I think we should be incentivated to build balanced parties. That can be solved with different classes being able to fill different "roles" (Such as clerics that can control the battlefield like wizards do if properly built for that, bards that can heal, or fighters with decent enough skills to be passable at what rogues do). Naturally some classes will be better at those roles, but other classes can do one or more of those roles good enough to be playable.
I don't think we should be "forced" to play a fighter, a rogue, a wizard and a cleric. Fortunately, I don't think the Devs want it either.
I think we should be incentivated to build balanced parties. That can be solved with different classes being able to fill different "roles" (Such as clerics that can control the battlefield like wizards do if properly built for that, bards that can heal, or fighters with decent enough skills to be passable at what rogues do). Naturally some classes will be better at those roles, but other classes can do one or more of those roles good enough to be playable.
That sounds reasonable and gives me less misgivings.
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The balanced party paradigm won't end unless you drastically alter how classes work (which could happen.)
It's par for the course with a class system: some of them will be good at some things, mediocre at others, and bad at the rest. If anyone can do anything, why have a class system at all?
And from this stems that a party consisting solely of X class isn't gonna be as effective as a party with W/X/Y/Z. Or even just X/X/Y/Z. And that's fine. If you don't like it, go play a classless system.
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That is a good point why have classess if the their is no definition between them.
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I would like if people didn't use the word videogame as a pejorative.
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I don't think we should be "forced" to play a fighter, a rogue, a wizard and a cleric. Fortunately, I don't think the Devs want it either.
I think we should be incentivated to build balanced parties. That can be solved with different classes being able to fill different "roles" (Such as clerics that can control the battlefield like wizards do if properly built for that, bards that can heal, or fighters with decent enough skills to be passable at what rogues do). Naturally some classes will be better at those roles, but other classes can do one or more of those roles good enough to be playable.
I would definitely love if there were more options and less locked in roles and 'must haves' in party design. I've played games were it simply wasn't possible to advance without a cleric on healing duty, which doesn't much bug me, since I love playing clerics, but it seems weird that a druid can't fill that role, and that other classes don't have options like a rogue variant that has increased options with the Heal skill (just like a traditional rogue can do things with Disable Device that other schmucks just can't), or a monk that can share his ki healing powers, or a bard with a fast-healing-song.
With 'resonance' nuking the option of using wands of cure light wounds to Band-Aid over this hole in the system, which makes some classes necessary and others incapable of succeeding without them, this sort of thing seems even more necessary than it was.
Similarly, it's possible to create a fighter that effectively controls the battlefield, but it doesn't feel like the game *encourages* that sort of thing. It should. Every class should be able to cover multiple roles (even if I understand that not every class will be able to cover *all* roles, and most individual characters won't be able to excel at more than one).
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I would like if people didn't use the word videogame as a pejorative.
Video games are absolutely fine for what they are. I enjoy playing them. They aren’t, however, what I want from a tabletop rpg.
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Video games are absolutely fine for what they are. I enjoy playing them. They aren’t, however, what I want from a tabletop rpg.
It's a ridiculous statement made from a point of view where apparently an entire medium can be reduced down to just things like "Cooldowns" or "Roles" or whatever mechanic the individual using Videogames as a pejorative dislikes, because apparently all videogames are the same.
Videogames as a medium have covered billions of different mechanics, so apparently you can just use it as an easy excuse against anything without having to actually form a proper argument.
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But you have to admit that succeeding at tasks by turning shapes as they fall from the ceiling to make complete lines probably wouldn't be an appropriate mechanic for a tabletop RPG.
Idk, I mean they've made Jenga into an effective mechanic for a tabletop RPG. You just need to find the right thing for the mechanic to represent. Could work as part of a hacking mechanic in a cyberpunk RPG as my first thought. Would probably be handled 2-dimensionally like tetris on the table rather than 3d though.
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PF1 is already great at supporting "unbalanced" parties! Things like wands of CLW really aid in that. I just hope PF2 does as good of a job as PF1 in not "demanding" any role.
Honestly, I cringe a little every time I see a thread asking, "The party so far has an X a Y and a Z, what should I play?" Because the best answer is always "Play whatever you are inspired to play! Forget about what anyone else is playing."
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PF1 kinda already did this, in the sense that you could have a party that didn't have a skill guy/rogue if your paladin/barbarian just took all traps to the face and healed/recovered the downsides after.
Wizards could summon or buff to do this.
But demanding that any class can handle any problem leads to homogeneous design that kinda defeats the purpose of having classes at all.
It would be more like, build a character and cherry pick all your abilities so everyone can be their own Gary Stu/Mary Sue.
IIRC, this was the thing that made people leave 4th edition and come to Pathfinder 1E in the first place.
Essentially, you want to take the Role out of Role Playing, am I correct?
You may actually get your wish, in that archetypes will be in from the start, and it at least sounds like skills are going to be significantly beefed up, and characters will have more freedom in choosing from among the entire list of skills instead of always being 3 behind because it's not a class skill.
However, this still requires the players to build their characters together to ensure the party still has some ability to deal with different kinds of challenges. If players are building in a vacuum and they just all happen to show up with four similar fighter builds (or monk builds, or whatever), the game is going to be a lot harder for them and I'm not sure how much can realistically be done to mitigate that. If the game proceeds from there without the GM convincing some of the players to change classes / builds, the GM would have to make up for their shortcomings with magic item drops, GMPCs and the like. There's little way around it.
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In fantasy stories based around adventure, there are going to be various challenges that heroes face. These sets of problems and obstacles will cover a range of topics, all the wider the more developed the setting is. Golarion has the full gamut of fantastic adventure challenges available, and its developers & scenario authors take advantage of that.
So how do you want to face those threats?
Me, I'd like a comparable range of skill sets among my party, knowing we'll face a similar variety of threats. I would dislike a narrower range of threats, composed simply to match our abilities. That lessens the verisimilitude and makes me feel pandered to.
If everybody chooses their PCs in a vacuum, the party's breadth will likely be narrower than ideal. So what are you saying the game should do to adjust to that? Obviously a GM could easily tailor their game to suit the party's imbalance. Just as obviously, the published material cannot. That said, one of the rules of thumb with adventure design is to make two solutions to every problems, two routes to success.
How much more could Paizo do than that?
I've also seen imbalanced parties do well. The players simply have to know their strengths so as to capitalize on them.
Don't have a rogue? Conjure up sum trap detonators. Buy 10' pole and adamantine hacksaw.
Don't have a mage? Carry more alchemy & some emergency scrolls/potions.
Don't have a cleric? Prep more defensive magic and do a commando blitz.
Don't have a fighter? Work at range. Cast walls & summon critters.
(Ran an SFS adventure where we had no frontliner. Everybody would set up down the hallway, with us taking turns opening doors and running away. Thank goodness no monsters had grab.)
Tl;dr: A well-rounded party is ideal in a game system built to have a breadth of obstacles. An imbalanced party can usually adjust to handle the same obstacles, perhaps at a cost. So what's the worry?
No.
Tl;dr: A well-rounded party is ideal in a game system built to have a breadth of obstacles. An imbalanced party can usually adjust to handle the same obstacles, perhaps at a cost. So what's the worry?
^ I was going to write a long Kerri-riffic post but this is exactly how I feel.
I ended up with a 4x melee frontliner + 1 healer party in an AP I'm running. I think it can work, but there are going to be some challenges that are harder to handle and will require some creativity. The GM never feels "safe" throwing out some stuff unless he knows there is a way to overcome it.
I'm just happy if the new game doesn't seem to require full casters as much as the old one did. It's really hard to get people in my group to sign up for full casters other than Witches, Oracles, and the occasional Druid.
If they got their ideas from 5e (or even later 4e) then with the backgrounds and other items, you may be in luck.
In these systems, characters have the chance to grab skills (for example, in 5e if you choose a criminal background you can have proficiency with Thieves tools (aka, picking locks) and Stealth which are two of the big items that thieves are known for.
In PF2e includes options like that it is possible that you could at least be good to go with fewer classes in the party.
I personally prefer to keep the balanced party dynamic.
Even on an unbalanced party, it makes sense to vary your focus. A 4 fighter team might have a two handed expert, tower shield user, archer, and a reach trip build. It's better to spread out what you can do. The more stuff the team can do, the more answers to problems you'll have. You'll also not have to worry about players stepping on each other's toes.
Yeah it's a team game, but if another player does your character's job but better/easier, well that might cause some problems at the table.
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I disagree, or at least I want to propose a more nuanced version of the OP's request. There's no need to design the game so a party of 4 fighters is as viable as a classic party will all 4 roles: That's taking it to a fringe level. I don't think PF1 can do this, anyway.
However, it's reasonable to ask that a party where one of the roles is missing should be viable, if slightly less than optimal.
One of the concerns with the Resonance concept is that it makes it likely that a healer-less party is at a severe long-term disadvantage. Hopefully, this potential gap will be addressed.
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However, it's reasonable to ask that a party where one of the roles is missing should be viable, if slightly less than optimal.
We have this in PF1 already.
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However, it's reasonable to ask that a party where one of the roles is missing should be viable, if slightly less than optimal.We have this in PF1 already.
Indeed, we do. This doesn't need to be fixed in PF2. However, it's fair to ask that PF2 doesn't regress in that regard.