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Well, I've read through all the sections of the rulebook. I surely have not absorbed all the rules and have only skimmed most class entries and feats, but I think I have now a generally informed idea of what the new rules entail. I also cross-referenced the bestiary to get an idea how AC vs. attack bonus is supposed to work, as well as saves vs. DC's.
What I got away is that the system is designed to provide better balance at every level. That is why we get +level to everything, since it makes the randomization factor much smaller, where some classes pulled so far away from the rest in their field of expertise that the GM was forced to throw outsized challenges at a group just to reign in the super specialized characters.
That is a laudable goal and we'll see from the Doomsday Dawn playtest if the writers managed to reach said goal.
However.
The price we have paid is a much more limited customization for characters, since through class feats many abilities everyone of a certain mien will want to have (all martials, all casters, etc) are now gated away to certain classes.
The second price seems to be that spellcasters overall have been heavily nerfed, both in terms of their power level through spells and as well in their daily endurance. Most spellcasters will also produce the same spell DC's when compared at the same level to each other.
As someone who loves playing spellcasters, the latter is a bit offensive to me, because when I compare my current Sorcerer I'm playing it's almost comical how much more powerful and enduring the magic he produces is, compared to what a same-level counterpart in PF2E could do. The PF2E version would still mop the floor with him, due to the "level to everything" mechanic, but overall it seems that the developers went way overboard in making almost every spell worse than the PF1E version.
I think my main two problems with the playtest version of PF2E are that characters seem to have lost a lot of their adventuring endurance, through less spells per day and consumables costing resonance.
If I could give only one piece of feedback, it would be to give spellcasters back more spells per day, but keep the nerf to spells themselves, so that there is more parity between casters and martials and cut "consumables cost resonance" and rework the resonance numbers to accomodate for that in terms of permanently equipped items and some class powers. Making the already short adventuring days even shorter seems like a poor solution to "bags of cure light wound wands".
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the playtest document is laid out in a really unintuitive and obtuse manner. Class powers should not have been mixed into the spell lists. Spells should have a clear indication which classes can cast them (it worked out quite okay in PF1E after all). It gets really annoying if I always need to flip back or forward a few to some hundred pages to get the full information for one particular thing my character can do. Please improve this for the full release.
Overall, I am not really too happy, but I am willing to give this a chance and hope to influence the developers to pull back on some of the things I really dislike. I hope to get people together to provide some actual game playtest, so that I can provide more substantial data.
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Oh, and I have seriously no idea how the party treasure by level table on page 347 can jive with the character wealth table on the next page. A new character introduced late in the campaign should get substantially less treasure than another character who has been in the campaign before that? That seems off to me.
Also, four other things which seem worthy of reconsideration are signature skills (another feature which kills customization), uncommon and rare spells (puts too much power into the hands of a bad or simply unexperienced GM to screw over players), secret plus essentially random magic item crafting DC's (for the same reason as the point before) and the GM being expressly called out as being able to just declare your character unressurectable just because (once more, because giving so much power to the GM is the kind of thing which creates interminable "This GM touched me in a bad place!" threads).
I think that's all for now. More to follow after I get some people together. :)
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On unintuitive book layout: I have to agree as well--it took a good deal of looking to find the alchemical item/formulas section for alchemists, as it was located near the very back of the book, oddly far away from the gear and items sections that one would expect them to be contained within. that it only mentioned this location once in the class entry (and not even in the formulas class ability description!) is also strange.
Ignoring some of the obvious remarks that imply some things are set in stone cold hard fact unchangeable, there are some things I can agree with. The organization is something that vastly needs to improve. I can see why it's like this if I take it from the view point of "We're doing this so that you can be sure you're reading this correctly", but even by that view point it seems to be too much. Ctrl-F'ing a PDF greatly helps in this, but it's still aggravating to have to flip back and forth between so much.
As for the the uncommon and rare spell, I can see what it's attempting, but there is too much potential for what you're saying, the allowance of a GM screwing players over. Granted, I think a lot of that will fall on to simple preface that there will be GM's who can understand the balance of using those to create unique narrative and those who haven't fully grasped what creates a unique narrative that doesn't wind up one sided in a situation that feels like it's Player vs GM to the death.
I will admit that a spell casting class is my immediate go to as a player (I'm more combat and skill than casting), when I look at casting for a unique villain I tend to look at spells that could possibly throw off the party in what they were expecting. But the issue lays in once that spell is cast, any caster has the potential to just go "I know that spell, this is how we kill him in 3 rounds or less." What would you think if they were to implement a better solution to creating spells so that you can have a spell that is uncommon or rare that can actually have the feel of being unique, but not gamebreaking as well?
Ignoring some of the obvious remarks that imply some things are set in stone cold hard fact unchangeable
I am not sure where you got that from my post? I was referring to what I read in the playtest document, stated what I think is their design goal and then referred to the material we are testing for them. Nowhere did I imply that I think that they are unwilling to change things. Which is a thing which other people have done and I agree that it is singularly unhelpful to go so fatalistic so fast.
I will admit that a spell casting class is my immediate go to as a player (I'm more combat and skill than casting), when I look at casting for a unique villain I tend to look at spells that could possibly throw off the party in what they were expecting. But the issue lays in once that spell is cast, any caster has the potential to just go "I know that spell, this is how we kill him in 3 rounds or less." What would you think if they were to implement a better solution to creating spells so that you can have a spell that is uncommon or rare that can actually have the feel of being unique, but not gamebreaking as well?
The thing is, the uncommon spells are mostly not combat spells (at least for the arcane list, where I primarily did my check) but rather utility ones, like Teleport, Magnificent Mansion, Tongues and Detect Scrying. So I don't think the intent is to prevent players from using standard countering tactics to expected spells. Rather it seems that the developers want to make it easier for GM's to prevent certain out-of-combat playstyles, but at the cost of some serious table trouble in certain groups.
I know I would be really angry if I played with a new GM and Teleport, one of the most standard spells almost everybody takes in every 3.X game I've ever been in, suddenly has become a spell "only known in certain societies and cabals".
So if, for example, we took that list and flipped it. You bring up Teleport, so I'll go with that. With the uncanny ability to keep both spells on the same page, let's flip Teleport with Tangling Creepers. Both 6th level arcane conjuration spells. Teleport as a commonly used spell in larger cities that you encounter at that point of casting levels makes more sense than seeing the local village having it at will with everyone knowing it. So early on, yeah it's a little rare and uncommon, but as you go on, it becomes more commonplace. Where as Tangling Creepers you can make it feel where a caster could learn it in an academy or college or what have you, but you're more likely to encounter it in groups that are more tuned to nature. Big bad that teleports? Yeah, it can be expected. Tangling Creepers when he's not some kind of villain who's trying to dominate the planet via plants and nature? Seems a little out there to be considered common. Is that a feasible example of what you'd be looking at?
Sure, I would totally be okay with uncommon and rare spells being the ones which you don't see often and would support them only being available by GM fiat. We already have that in PF1E after all, with racial spells or ones from adventure path modules.
I think I'm just confused on what the design idea is in making priorily very common spell picks like Teleport and Tongues suddenly spells rarely known and subject to only being available through arbitrary GM decisions.
Yeah, it doesn't entirely make sense on that to me either. Personally, I think that an attempt to make spells seem similar to items in regard to availability standards isn't going to work out very well because it could fall into more confusion and "That makes absolutely no sense" moments. I do see the thematic impacts, but for it to really get anywhere, I think they would have to get a survey out that creates a gauge of what spells would be more common and which ones wouldn't be. From there we could go on as to the commonality in circumstances. I mean seriously, how many 10th level casters are you going to encounter in a major city that aren't personalities bent on global domination?
Yeah, it doesn't entirely make sense on that to me either. Personally, I think that an attempt to make spells seem similar to items in regard to availability standards isn't going to work out very well because it could fall into more confusion and "That makes absolutely no sense" moments. I do see the thematic impacts, but for it to really get anywhere, I think they would have to get a survey out that creates a gauge of what spells would be more common and which ones wouldn't be. From there we could go on as to the commonality in circumstances. I mean seriously, how many 10th level casters are you going to encounter in a major city that aren't personalities bent on global domination?
Actually if it's "only" 10th level, I can think of more than a few in the official setting. :p If we are talking about 10th level spell casters, though, probably none. ^^
I can see Teleport being GM fiat because it's capable of breaking a scenario, in the same way that some Detect spells can derail a detective story. If the GM wants the PCs to make a difficult journey across the Crown of the World and face a horde of Frost Giants, or sneak past a besieging army to bring the McGuffin that'll rescue the city, he doesn't want them to teleport straight past it. Booooring.
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Actually, continuing that thought: an AP or other published scenario will have to give guidelines on what spells are expected or verboten. If you are or are not supposed to know Teleport or Plane Shift or Dimensional Anchor or Detect Lies or what have you (because having it'll break the scenario, or vice versa) the GM had better know that in advance.
Yeah, I definitely meant the 10th level spells there Mag lol. That would be awkward if there was an entire populous being able to cast Wish running around. And I get what you're saying there Mud. The thing is though that that's an issue that GM's are going to have to deal with at some point. I mean, for example the 3.5 druid. When done right, that was a character that could derail tone setting. GM: The sky starts to turn a darker color as clouds start to converge and become more- Druid: Control Weather. The GM now has to figure out how either the tone of what supposed to be a long night gets shifted because the rules say so.
Could Teleport be redone to say that it can only specifically work if you have an active link to said destination? Sure, it could. But how much is that going to actually solve? Because then you could just teleport that horde of frost giants into a giant volcano because you just happened to set that as an active link.
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Teleport has always been a part of the game since before 3.0 was a thing, so behaving as if it suddenly is this big narrative problem seems a bit disingenous. There are lots of workarounds to reigning it in, like we had in Jade Regent or just how this version for the playtest is written. If you've never been there, you can't teleport to a location anyway. There's no Greater Teleport anymore which let's you just do it by description. So I don't really get why it has also to be gated behind GM fiat.
with utility options being the focus of those limited for play, it worries me that even the devs are aiming to make the game a purely combat-oriented one, what with many previously built-in skill actions being bound behind feats and levels now and their playtest materials being almost entirely focused on just dungeoncrawling and combat.
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I can see Teleport being GM fiat because it's capable of breaking a scenario, in the same way that some Detect spells can derail a detective story. If the GM wants the PCs to make a difficult journey across the Crown of the World and face a horde of Frost Giants, or sneak past a besieging army to bring the McGuffin that'll rescue the city, he doesn't want them to teleport straight past it. Booooring.
I will say that I would rather them not exclude a spell like Teleport for story reasons but make a spell or ritual that counters it. For Example Redirect Teleportation could be a ritual spell that sends the players to somewhere else maybe even putting them in a little tougher spot but it puts them where the story wants them to go.
Also one major hamper on Teleportation is that you still need to know where you are going and scrying does not help you in getting to know an area enough to teleport anymore.
Teleport requiring 10 minutes to cast as well doesn't make it an effective combat tactic right now anyways by the way. I don't think we've really counted that in this discussion lol.