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Me and Ben Durbin (screen name Wulf Ratbane from the now-defunct Bad Axe Games) proposed a pretty sweeping consolidation of bonus types to just, I think, five, with a goal of making it easier to make characters and less necessary to hunt for magic items that stack. Like, Armor Class would just be Ability (Dex), Item (armor), Magic (either enchanted armor or a ring of protection or an amulet of natural armor), Circumstance (cover, or aid from an ally), and Talent (any feats or class abilities you had), added to the base of 10.
Want to make a skill check? You could have ability, item, magic, circumstance, and talent bonuses added to your skill ranks. Attack rolls would add those to your base attack bonus.
We had some support on the EN World forums, but lots of people wanted to stay as backward-compatible with 3rd edition as possible.
We also had a proposal to have a single core spellcasting progression chart, and to have caster levels from different classes stack. Wizard 5/Cleric 5 would get the spell slots of a 10th level caster. Bards got 3/4 CL progression, rangers and paladins got 1/2, and noncaster classes would get 1/4, but couldn't do anything with those slots unless they had a caster class too.
Despite getting higher level slots, though, you could only access spells from a given class if you had enough levels in that class alone to get that spell. So a wizard 5/cleric 5 might have caster level 10 and 5th level spell slots, but couldn't put any spells in her spellbook higher than wizard 3, nor pray for anything about cleric 3. Higher slots would only be useful for metamagic and for casting more spells of lower level.
Your class would tell you what you could do with your slots. Wizards just prepared from a spellbook. Clerics and druids prepared from their whole class list. Bards and sorcerers could use any empty slot to cast from the spells they knew. Clerics got bonus slots only for domain spells, and sorcerers got bonus slots only for sorcerer spells (though if we'd known how bloodlines would work, we probably would have given slots just for those).
So a fighter 10 who had a religious experience could pick up cleric 1 and have caster level 6, but only be able to prepare 1st level spells.
Ditto, it was deemed too different from 3e.
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Wasnt Enworld notorious for deleting all anti-4e sentiment back in the day?
Bwuh? Hardly. There were vicious flame wars between people who liked 4e and those who liked 3.5/PF. Like a rift forming in a religion, people were legitimately angry at folks who wanted a different ruleset from their preferred one.
I mean, yeah, people got banned for being a-holes, and eventually they created a forum that was specifically for people who wanted to edition war. The moderators got (I think) appropriately trigger happy with moving threads to that forum if people insisted on sidelining every conversation into why game X or game Y was a steaming pile of cheese, and being vulgar would get you temp-banned. But they very seldom deleted posts.
There was one guy who so wretched that the site's owner shadowbanned him. Now, 10 years later, the owner will still sometimes check in on the guy, and find that he's still spewing hatred and vitriol on tons of threads, apparently oblivious to the fact that no one has ever responded to him in years.
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they simply couldn't communicate thier feedback in a manner that wasn't... caustic.
Sadly that's all too common. People in general just aren't good about being civil. I know that I can be opinionated at times basically all the time, but I do try to keep the discourse civil. Here's hoping that the more positive voices in the community prevail.
There was one guy who so wretched that the site's owner shadowbanned him. Now, 10 years later, the owner will still sometimes check in on the guy, and find that he's still spewing hatred and vitriol on tons of threads, apparently oblivious to the fact that no one has ever responded to him in years.
How self-absorbed do you need to be to not notice that!?
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Come now folks, surely you don't expect Paizo to act on all good feedback, no matter how insightful and well-articulated it is. First of all, Paizo was and is married (to certain degrees) to the idea of backward compatibility and to rules conservatism. (Aka "does it feel like what came before?") A significant and vocal chunk of the fanbase plays PF because it's not 4e/5e and/or because WotC is the Evil Megacorporation that ruined FR forever.
Secondly, the devs themselves have preferences just like the rest of us, and they're not going to write a game they themselves don't want to play. Anyone who's ever shared their homebrew ruleset can attest that you always get feedback that may be entirely reasonable and insightful, but is completely outside the scope of the game you want to write. And when the scope of the game includes "Must be backwards compatible" and "must feel like a game with a lot of rules issues," there will be insightful and well-articulated feedback that gets brushed aside simply because it's outside the game's scope.
Sometimes the feedback is "there is no problem with it except I dont like it," too. Who can blame them?
The big change that stood out to me from the playtest was the skill system. The alpha playtest had you pick a set number of skills at 1st level, and those skills leveled up with your PCs. I don't recall if there was ever a way to get more skills at the cost of having fewer ranks in each.
That system did not go over well at all, and I believe it got changed before the beta even began.
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Rogue at the time, too, was in a different place than it was, today. Rogue in 3.5 was a strong enough class that fighters and barbarians regularly MC'd into it. It's just with PF, all classes got boosted.
It's not so much that the rogue was "stronger" in 3.x, but rather that that niche protection was stronger. There were many more things that only a rogue was capable of doing: For example Trapfinding was required to even detect 3.x traps with a DC above 20 (rather than using Disable Device to disarm PF1 magical traps). Also, because of the way 3.x was geared toward prestige classes, rogue was pretty much one of the only ways to get Sneak Attack and/or Evasion with minimal level investment. Finally, a one level dip in rogue (especially starting as a rogue at 1st level) was a popular way of boosting skills, which were a greater concern in 3.x because PF1 consolidated quite a few skills (or made them a "non-skill;" i.e., Concentration) and the way 3.x cross-class skills worked.
I imagine the difference is that Pathfinder 1 went from "Paizo needs a system to write adventures for" to "Paizo needs to publish a backwards compatible game for people who don't want to switch to 4e."
There was a lot of stuff in PF1 that existed for legacy reasons that people *knew* didn't work well and could be replaced.
It will be interesting to see if after another 10 years whether those people are still around, whether they want the same stuff and whether they're still in the majority. I'm suddenly seeing a lot more names from the WotC 4e forums since the playtest was announced.
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And a lot of that went back to Paizo's orginal request of the gaming community (the same request they've made in every playest since and the one they're running for PF2): they wanted playest feedback, not theorycraft. "I created a DPR spreadheet of this attack option mechanic and found it to be mathematically inferior to this other attack action mechanic" will always get less designer attention than "I played this and I had fun." It's baked into the DNA of the playtest: play it and give us feedback.Saying "that's what Paizo asked for" is just kicking the can down the road. And can we dispense with the pseudo-wisdom that "mere theorycraft" is somehow less valuable than the results of what we can assume are not rigorous tests? Theorycrafting is the result of a playtest with an infinitely large sample size. You don't need to run experiments to find out what the rules of the world are when it's a simulated world whose rules are readily available.
"My Rogue has no trouble hitting" is fairly meaningless for testing purposes. Maybe you did have trouble hitting and don't remember it, or your rolls happened to be mostly good, or the GM used lower AC enemies than usual, or, or, or.
Lots of people have fun playing RIFTS or WoD, partly because playing games with your friends is fun in general, and partly because the settings of those systems are fun for many people even though mechanically the systems are tire fires. "It's not fun" is often a good indication that something's wrong, but "it's fun" is not necessarily an indication that nothing's wrong.
You. I like you.
While the devs can say that "theorycrafting takes a backseat to in-game data" all they like, a group of several hundred players doing number-crunching is much more likely to find errors in the system's basic math than the roughly dozen people they have working on this book, assuming everyone is devoted to the crunchy number bits. Sure, you're going to get people who are going to use theorycrafting to try and say a class is over-or-underpowered, but that's a good chance for someone like Mark Seifter to pop up and explain a class's math and why the previous claim is either correct or incorrect.
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There was one guy who so wretched that the site's owner shadowbanned him. Now, 10 years later, the owner will still sometimes check in on the guy, and find that he's still spewing hatred and vitriol on tons of threads, apparently oblivious to the fact that no one has ever responded to him in years.
Wow. That's impressive. And actually seems like a pretty good end result for all involved. Guy still gets to vent his spleen, and the forums don't get clogged with toxic crap. Win win.
The obliviousness is super impressive as well.
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It will be interesting to see if after another 10 years whether those people are still around, whether they want the same stuff and whether they're still in the majority. I'm suddenly seeing a lot more names from the WotC 4e forums since the playtest was announced.I imagine the difference is that Pathfinder 1 went from "Paizo needs a system to write adventures for" to "Paizo needs to publish a backwards compatible game for people who don't want to switch to 4e."
There was a lot of stuff in PF1 that existed for legacy reasons that people *knew* didn't work well and could be replaced.
I think PF1 was done with a lot less advance planning, so they necessarily made fewer changes than they are planning this time around. I imagine that they would have preferred for WotC to have made a game system more like Pathfinder for their 4th edition.
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It will be interesting to see if after another 10 years whether those people are still around, whether they want the same stuff and whether they're still in the majority. I'm suddenly seeing a lot more names from the WotC 4e forums since the playtest was announced.I imagine the difference is that Pathfinder 1 went from "Paizo needs a system to write adventures for" to "Paizo needs to publish a backwards compatible game for people who don't want to switch to 4e."
There was a lot of stuff in PF1 that existed for legacy reasons that people *knew* didn't work well and could be replaced.
I think PF1 was done with a lot less advance planning, so they necessarily made fewer changes than they are planning this time around. I imagine that they would have preferred for WotC to have made a game system more like Pathfinder for their 4th edition.
This. I dont believe Paizo had anywhere near the resources to do the kind of changes they are attempting now. Paizo wanted a system to keep writing their adventures in. They did what they had to get the ball moving again. WOTC pushed Paizo into the rules business and now here we are.
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And a lot of that went back to Paizo's orginal request of the gaming community (the same request they've made in every playest since and the one they're running for PF2): they wanted playest feedback, not theorycraft. "I created a DPR spreadheet of this attack option mechanic and found it to be mathematically inferior to this other attack action mechanic" will always get less designer attention than "I played this and I had fun." It's baked into the DNA of the playtest: play it and give us feedback.Saying "that's what Paizo asked for" is just kicking the can down the road. And can we dispense with the pseudo-wisdom that "mere theorycraft" is somehow less valuable than the results of what we can assume are not rigorous tests? Theorycrafting is the result of a playtest with an infinitely large sample size. You don't need to run experiments to find out what the rules of the world are when it's a simulated world whose rules are readily available.
"My Rogue has no trouble hitting" is fairly meaningless for testing purposes. Maybe you did have trouble hitting and don't remember it, or your rolls happened to be mostly good, or the GM used lower AC enemies than usual, or, or, or.
Lots of people have fun playing RIFTS or WoD, partly because playing games with your friends is fun in general, and partly because the settings of those systems are fun for many people even though mechanically the systems are tire fires. "It's not fun" is often a good indication that something's wrong, but "it's fun" is not necessarily an indication that nothing's wrong.
I hope the quotes you put around "mere theorycraft" wasn't an attempt to attribute that to me, because I certainly didn't say that or even imply it.
I'm not knocking theorycraft; it has a useful place in the desgn process of any product. What I am saying is that Paizo has stated that they're doing the theorycraft in-house and they'd like the gaming community to play the rules and give them feedback. Whether you or I agree with that approach doesn't matter because that's how Paizo has decided to do things. Based on 10 years worth of watching them run playtests, I can tell you that if you want them to listen to your comments, then play the game and give playtest feedback. If you only bring theorycraft to the table, they may not listen.
Sometimes something can look great on paper, but fail at the table for no reason other than it being too fiddly for players to want to mess with (RIP Rage Paoints).
-Skeld
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By the way, i don't know if anyone's linked to it already, but the original PF Playtest forum is still accessible if you want to see what the discussion looked like back then.
-Skeld
My tables kept the Alpha/Beta channeled energy. It's not really strong enough to be OP as it was, for us at least.
I think PF1 was done with a lot less advance planning, so they necessarily made fewer changes than they are planning this time around. I imagine that they would have preferred for WotC to have made a game system more like Pathfinder for their 4th edition.
Right. But if the reaction to their changes was strong enough (and I hold no illusions it will be) they would need to rewind those significant changes. So I'll be interested how much of the old guard have stuck around and how much their tastes have changed.
...
I think Skeld is onto something here. Lots of us were clamoring for sorcerers to be able to upcast all spells at will before we got our hands on it, because that power sounds amazing and would finally get the sorcerer out of the wizard's shadow.
But Mark said having that degree of flexibility in the moment made the sorcerer too much to be fun for play testers in practice. So they are instead letting the sorcerer upcast SOME spells at will. (Also, it made sorcerers kinda OP but that's separate from what Skeld brought up.)