shadowrun is amazing, it is super crunchy, and can be complex. however once you get, of all the games, I think mechanically it gives the greatest immersion because of it's simlulation-esue aesthetic. the biggest problem is the rulebook much like this playtest, is just not well thought out, with rules appearing in different sections.I was a 5e player both in d&d and shadowrun. And my 5e d&d table (6 of us and a DM) of 4yrs just unanimously decided to,switch over to PF2. D&D 5e got a bit stale and pathfinder 2 is a breath of fresh air for us. But thats just My store atmOh god, Shadowrun. How do you do it? How does anyone do it? I love the lore, but man is that game brutal on crunch. Just this past month, I tried to finally give it a go after enjoying the video games for years and spent days figuring out all the little rules, building characters, so on and so forth. I love the priority mechanics for character building and sifting through all the gear and options is a great way to waste an entire day.
But actually playing it is just such a slog. I gave up after a few sessions after I found a HERO System conversion that transfers the whole economy, Matrix, Spells, races etcetera from Shadowrun. HERO is no less complicated than Shadowrun if we're being fair, but I've been playing it long enough that I have house rules, tricks and all the tables memorized to counter-balance the crunch.
I found that combat just takes way too long. Some people have told me it's because the game isn't about combat. But that sounds like an argument to make fighting simpler and faster than something like D&D (where it very much is the point) rather than more complex. Nothing takes me out of a game faster than stopping to do long division.
But on the other hand, there is a lot about Shadowrun I love. Character generation is great, the lore is great, the variety of gear and mechanical crunch makes it really rewarding to put a plan together and pull it off perfectly or pull out of a nosedive when shot hits the fan. I just think it needs to really consider an overhaul to a lot of its subsystems.
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My main gripe is that pf2 seems to me more "Paizo 4e" than "Paizo 5e" or "Paizo 3.8". I liked, and still like, basic, 2e, 3e, pf1, 5e. Never liked 4e though. I hope I will change my mind about pf2.
Given that 5e is the mainstream at the moment, made so mostly by being easy to learn and abandoning system mastery, I expected PF2 to become the new "5.5" (5e easy entry + PF1 flexibility) and fully welcomed it.
It seems what we got instead is closer to "4.5" which is baffling on one end but also not as surprising given that they share some of the designers.It's probably not the end of the world given that 4e had some decent mechanics and its biggest problem was terrible lore, where PF2 is light years ahead. But also it doesn't seem to be the winning bet that will allow Paizo to overtake WoTC again. I hope the playtest leaves enough time for them to do some major overhauls before release.
I want to know where all these people get all their insider info.
Is there somewhere I can go to see a game totally crushing another game in market share, or one company completely outselling another? I never knew any of it.
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Well with all the people on here complaining about how 3.5 is dying, I find it hard to believe there aren't any people out there to play with.
And if people have started to sour on 3.X, what better reason than that Paizo to move on from it? It's an unfortunate outcome for people who still love it but that doesn't make it valid criticism. Basically, and I know how callous this sounds but it is simply the best possible way to put this, that sounds like a you problem.
I'm just surprised that 3.5/Pathfinder is so bad that people played it for 10 years because... why? I rarely see why it's good from people on the very board for the game other than "Oh this is how you break the game".
And I guess I am the problem. I like the game and don't see a reason to switch for myself. Problems in the system look to be fixed with patches and home rules.
PF1 dies because it's old, broken, unfun, and trash.
And while I don't want it to happen, the irony of PF2 not succeeding because it is or isn't PF1 given all the complaints about PF1 is just funny to me.
Sail on Paizo and good luck to you.
I want to know where all these people get all their insider info.
Is there somewhere I can go to see a game totally crushing another game in market share, or one company completely outselling another? I never knew any of it.
'
You don't need to be an insider to see the effects of it.
Take my local Game store. Even before PF2 playtest was announced, Most the Pathfinder books were stored in the back. You know what was stored up front with plenty of marketing to this day? DnD 5.
Heck there's a table to advertise small 1-2 hour board and card games up front near the entrance. PF books are in the back, not even upright just stacked on each other.
Does this mean PF1 is being completely crushed around the country? No.
But going by how my store handles PF books now and that Society is kicked to maybe twice a month, the writing on the wall seems pretty clear to me.
"There is little to no interest in Pathfinder at this store's customer base".
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A) People refusing to rebuy a slightly tweaked rulestDisproven by the very existance of PF
Not necessarily. Not sure, how many people like me play Pathfinder, but as far as I'm concerned, I've been there from the Pathfinder beginnings (was already here before), and I came and stayed because I loved the adventures they put out. Also liked Golarion quite a lot, but I never really cared about Pathfinder RPG because I was and still am very content with 3.5. I still transferred to Pathfinder a) to support Paizo and b) because I'm a lazy guy and and in doing so saved some time, because I didn't have to modify things this way.
PF didn't come into existence for us old timers. It started because they would not have been able to get new players to play their adventures when the ruleset used had no support anymore and would soon be out of print and unavailable to those players.
10 years later, and while I still love 3.5/PF, you'd probably have a hard time convincing me on spending more money on basically the same system once more, especially when I have started appreciating quite some things done with 4E in the last 5 years and am actively thinking about goigng 5E, because I'm not sure why I should use a complex beast like Pathfinder when none of my players cares for the rules exactly for that reason.
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But also it doesn't seem to be the winning bet that will allow Paizo to overtake WoTC again.
You don't bet on things that have no chances of happening anyways. The question is not and never was what Paizo can do to compete with WotC. The question is what they can do to carve out a niche for themselves, that is big enough to sustain them in the years to come.
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Stranger Things had more to do with the current success of 5e than anything else.
Stranger Things had more to do with the current success of 5e than anything else.
Didn't Stranger Things come out a couple of years after 5E?
5E was a smash hit right out of the blocks. I'm sure that the various media references/features are great for it (especially as a way to garner new players) but I don't think that can be the sole answer, or even the major one.
It's not my preferred game, but it clearly hits the right spot for a lot of people. There are many who love it for what it is.
Stranger Things had more to do with the current success of 5e than anything else.
That's a WAG if I've ever seen one.
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I'm no market analyst, but I think we need to think differently about the relationship between 5E and Pathfinder in this thread. There is not a fixed number of players who must choose between one of these two games, so that people who play one by definition cannot play the other. In other words, this is not a zero-sum position. Some people might play both, some people will get lured away by the new hotness no one expected (Mutagenic Cybernetic Zombie Rabbits: The RPG), some market-wide trends might uplift the entire industry (a rising tide, etc.), and on and on.
Really, all Paizo can do is make sure Pathfinder 2E is as fun to play as possible. If it is, they'll find customers. Comparisons ad nauseum to other systems in other contexts with other market niches, demographics, brand recognition, launch windows, business strategies, etc., are probably not going to be as important as the "do I like this game?" factor.
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I'm no market analyst...
Hey, don't sell yourself short. The greatest trick the market analysts ever pulled was convincing the world that market analysts had the slightest clue about...well, much of anything. ;-)
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I feel like the cracks in the 3.X engine were becoming pretty prevalent and I was actually glad to see a lot of its relics be written out.
Honestly, if it's not a complete overhaul, what's the point? If you're just tweaking the existing mechanics then don't bother with a new edition. Just release a book of variant rules and be done with it. And they already did that with Unchained and sprinkled throughout a myriad of other books over the last decade.
If you have criticisms about the new game, go for it. But the fact that it's distancing itself from 3.X isn't a valid one in my mind.
If you just want more Pathfinder 1, well you're set. Between Pathfinder's ridiculous amount of official material, all the 3rd party stuff and all the fully compatible 3.5 books put out by Wizards (and that is well into the hundreds) you are set. There is more content than you could ever hope to absorb and the system is weathered enough that you and tens of thousands of other fans have produced a nearly infinite number of variations, house rules, extra content and so forth, to tweak the game into exactly what you want.
Except next year at GenCon there aren't going to be Pathfinder 1 tables for me to play my characters I've spent the past two years building at.
I'm going to either have to switch to PF2 (haven't seen anything to make me want to yet), switch to another system (or more of another system- this year I did 4 slots 5E, 4 slots Pathfinder, but I've played Shadowrun before and if I'm trying a game that's completely new, which PF2 is there are many other options out there), or just not go.
I agree- they could have done another Unchained ruleset, then they could have even made those rules the baseline for PFS going forward if that's what they wanted to fix.
But they wanted to toss everything out, babies and bathwater, and start fresh. So here we are.
To expand on this, just adding an expansion of rules options in an unchained line doesn't change the core rules assumption. Players & GMs can still ignore rules overhauls that you do in an Unchained because they aren't core and new players won't be exposed to them and therefore will be unlikely to add them in in the future. This gets worse when you factor in things like modules & aps where devs have to figure out which to use or deal with customers who suddenly discover that all their rules are potentially years out of date and no one said anything.
I do agree on doing an incremental increase rather than a total overhaul similar to what Chaosium just did with the new CoC edition, but any major rules changes need to be added to a Core Rulebook and made part of the core assumption that comes with the next printing. Update the PDFs and give buyers the option to download old versions if they like from the purchase but make those new assumptions core to the products going forward. This also has the business benefit of allowing them to reprint old modules into the new core assumption after enough time has passed like RotRL or CotCT and resell them again like new, or more reasons to get those old APs when they repackage them as 1 hardback. And while you're doing that, customers might just be like, "ehh, guess I should grab up the new printing of the CRB. It's been like 4-5 years, and its changed enough I want the new physical to go with my updated digital."
Spending $40 every few years to reup my CRB copy because we had a nice update and keep parity with my digital sounds fine and with a bit of a slowdown on new products so I'm not breaking the bank to buy paizo's new hotness every 4 months would still make it cheaper than feeding my pseudo dormant videogame habit.
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Back to the original topic, PF 2E is hollow and falls flat. I hope Paizo is reading and listening.
I have 2E and I am playtesting it but I don't see where PF 2E builds from PF 1E and quite frankly I don't see where PF Organized Play could not have updated changes like Hero points, traits, Classes authorized/archetypes, etc.
In fact I think there is gonna be a huge problem of making all classes too similar and that min/max stat blocks and having the correct build of each class will quickly be figured out.
While wands and magic and a few things seemed to irk GMs now all I need to do to have a successful party is have a party of 3-4 Clerics and have each one take a fighter, wizard, rogue, archetype feat. It looks cool now perhaps, but it will become bland very quickly and what it might have been trying to fix will actually cause more problems in the long run.
I am a casual gamer, I spent a lot of money acquiring the Pathfinder 1E books, and for the first few years I was a PnP player but loved the idea I could take that character to GenCon, and sit in the Paizo room and play that character with a bunch of strangers. I actually did this at GenCon 2015 and 2016.
While I suspect/hope we can do the same with 2E, what disappoints me is that all the investment in building books and aps, in roleplaying and books, time it took will no longer be supported at the major conventions after August 2019. I don't have the time and resources to just start over for something that I see right now as unnecessary, does not "wow" me, and quite frankly feels hollow and flat.
paizo wont be reading or listening until they get back from gencon, so keep the threads whose topics you feel are important alive in the meantime!
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Update:
I signed up for two playtest scenarios (one at 1st level and one at 5th), so I had to make some PCs.
My first one, a 1st level Human Cleric of Gorum, took forever. I had to gut through four different sittings in order to finish and make sure I had everything correct.
Observations:
1) You have to fix the layout. Put Domain powers in the cleric section. Put the Deities section containing the Anathemas in the cleric section.
2) Clerics of Gorum might be unplayable in PFS because part of their anathema is “prevent conflicts through negotiation”.
3) When I finished, I felt a little tingle of what I dare say is excitement to try this guy out. (But the setting feels much more “low magic” than before.)
Second guy, a 5th level Human Cavalier, took much less time. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.
Observations:
1) Was going to make him a half-orc, but too prohibitive. I thinks its dumb half-orcs don’t get Darkvision until 5. Makes no sense RP-wise. Make Darkvision one of the half-orc choices at 1.
2) Put the animal companion section and archetype section right after the classes, so you don’t have to flip back and forth.
3) Too many things with the “feat” name. I prefer “talents”, “discoveries”, “powers”, etc. (I listened to the podcast about why you went with feat but it jumbles things.)
4) I’m even more excited with this PC. I want to try mounted combat (but Animal Companions are very underpowered).
I will give another update after I play, but my big take away:
→ Keep trying and make that first character, it will start to come together and you might actually get excited to play it. Get your mind right for a low powered, low magic game and I think your inner gamer will want to rise to the challenge. I’m shocked that I’m looking forward to playing. I'm no Paizo shill, so if my experience sucks I will say so, but I'm starting to see some possibility here.