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Just to point out, if Retributive Strike takes the Target down then their attack doesn’t go through. And if I don’t get to use it because enemies know I have it and thus stay away from my allies and/or focus on me then I’d say that’s a great ability for a Protector/Avenger/Hero.so the enemy needs to be a mook to count as protecting an ally (killing them before their attack), or if they're metagaming you don't get to use your core combat ability at all.
sounds like great design!
Anyone's a mook if you hit hard enough.
And it's not metagamining to see a person immediately lash out faster than they had been whenever someone attacks their allies and realize it might be a bad idea to repeat that.
Legitimately great design for the Paladin.
monsters' hp and defenses have been pretty much entirely retooled to last multiple rounds now (and generally to keep in mind that weapon dice scaling is now a thing).
on the second point, i'll grant you that--so you get to use your core combat ability maybe 3 times in a combat (short of an enemy just tanking the one retributive strike a round and continually attacking the ally anyway, especially since you can't exactly stop them from leaving afterwards if that's their intended goal), before it's then ignored for the rest.
Yep, and I have no problem with that. It's existence increases the safety of my Allies.
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I keep seeing a lot of posts, from both players and actual, real-life Paizo staff, that people need to play the game before providing any feedback.
To quote Paizo CTO Vic Wertz,
Tell us about your actual game play. Theory is all well and good, but everybody’s got theories, and we’ve probably heard most of them already. Tell us how things are actually working in play, not how you think things will work.But we should all keep in mind that the playtest is a game; and if someone is not excited enough to play the game then that is a valid complaint.
We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we argue about on the forums. What matters is how many people buy the rulebook at a bookstore and take it home; and if someone picks up the book and it looks boring, they're not going to reserve judgement until they've played a couple sessions. They're going to put it down, and just go with 5e.
I agree with the OP entirely.
If Paizo only listens to people who played the playtest their results will be hugely biased. I'm starting another game in a week or two and with all our adult responsibilities my BFF and I see no point in wasting precious free time on a game we see as fundamentally flawed.
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I keep seeing a lot of posts, from both players and actual, real-life Paizo staff, that people need to play the game before providing any feedback.
To quote Paizo CTO Vic Wertz,
Tell us about your actual game play. Theory is all well and good, but everybody’s got theories, and we’ve probably heard most of them already. Tell us how things are actually working in play, not how you think things will work.But we should all keep in mind that the playtest is a game; and if someone is not excited enough to play the game then that is a valid complaint.
We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we argue about on the forums. What matters is how many people buy the rulebook at a bookstore and take it home; and if someone picks up the book and it looks boring, they're not going to reserve judgement until they've played a couple sessions. They're going to put it down, and just go with 5e.
I agree with the OP entirely.
If Paizo only listens to people who played the playtest their results will be hugely biased. I'm starting another game in a week or two and with all our adult responsibilities my BFF and I see no point in wasting precious free time on a game we see as fundamentally flawed.
Whats the alternative? Making a game for people who aren't interested enough to play it for free?
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The alternative is taking seriously the comments about how individuals or groups couldn't be inspired enough to spend time actually playing the game.
Yeah and if that's like a handful of Loud people they are suppose to change everything for the vocal minority sell less and go bankrupt because that handful of internet posters made the biggest fuss?
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As for the _whys_, I'd expect to see some of that stuff in blog posts, but I think the best space for some of that is the Paizo Friday twitch shows we'll be doing weekly. A big portion of each show (as with the first one from last Friday) is a live Q&A. I think Jason took every question on Friday, so if you've got something like "please explain why you add level to everything," it might be easier and more instructive to ask it on Friday and let Jason (or whichever designer is on) go off on a tear about it.
Your point about cunning is an interesting one. It's a fun exercise to determine a key word for each class, and then evaluate the design in light of that.
Please don't just relegate this to twitch streams. One of things that I find unfortunate about today's Internet is that too many things that should be quick text pages turn into videos of people talking. Text is faster to read, faster to skim, much easier to refer to, and much easier to go back and reference. As others have mentioned, most of us have adulting to do, and there is the opportunity cost of spending time watching videos about the playtest that could otherwise be spent engaging in our hobby.
I posted a thread here asking for a list of what Pathfinder 2 is trying to accomplish. I dug up some stuff by looking at blog posts somebody else linked in another thread. However, I honestly can't see how many (most?) of the changes actually address what goals I've seen there. I suspect that there are other design goals that would explain why we're seeing a lot of the changes here. Having that information would really help. What is Paizo trying to do, other than reboot Pathfinder for the sake of rebooting? That would let us talk about whether or not the changes are succeeding separate from whether or not we like those goals, and would help focus things.
If I try to figure out what sort of system Paizo was aiming at with Pathfinder 2, right now the system reads to me like it was just trying to be different, and like a whole bunch of different ideas were thrown in for the sake of novelty rather than trying to make the system into a coherent whole. It doesn't really read to me like the system was designed around any overarching goals other than "make Pathfinder different". The result is that it reads like a mishmash. That was great for Pathfinder Unchained, which was explicitly a book of a whole bunch of ideas for how you might modify the game. But for a core rulebook, it leaves me confused and felling like the whole thing is muddled. Pathfinder isn't a Fate-like rules light game designed to be a toolkit for GMs to put together and modified the rules they really want; it has always been, and still reads like, a highly codified set of rules where GM modifications aren't part of the core assumption of the rules set, but "house rule" exceptions.
Maybe I'm wrong about why all the changes to PF2 were made, but in the absence of knowledge of the goals, I've failed to see what it's all about.
If I had to summarize it, I would say that the system seems to be trying to go after a 13th Age style of game, but came out much more regimented and specified, with a vastly huger quantity of rules and restrictions to keep track of. But why?
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Whats the alternative? Making a game for people who aren't interested enough to play it for free?I keep seeing a lot of posts, from both players and actual, real-life Paizo staff, that people need to play the game before providing any feedback.
To quote Paizo CTO Vic Wertz,
Tell us about your actual game play. Theory is all well and good, but everybody’s got theories, and we’ve probably heard most of them already. Tell us how things are actually working in play, not how you think things will work.But we should all keep in mind that the playtest is a game; and if someone is not excited enough to play the game then that is a valid complaint.
We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we argue about on the forums. What matters is how many people buy the rulebook at a bookstore and take it home; and if someone picks up the book and it looks boring, they're not going to reserve judgement until they've played a couple sessions. They're going to put it down, and just go with 5e.
I agree with the OP entirely.
If Paizo only listens to people who played the playtest their results will be hugely biased. I'm starting another game in a week or two and with all our adult responsibilities my BFF and I see no point in wasting precious free time on a game we see as fundamentally flawed.
so, a conundrum presents itself:
-the rules must change or be reorganized/reformatted to avoid driving away prospective new/returning players (either from user-unfriendliness or sheer boredom)
-one assumes the rules will change for the full release (this is just a playtest!)
-the rules wont change unless people talk about how they're driving away prospective new/returning players (to alert the designers that they need to move in the direction of whatever they will be the full release--since if the eventual "real" rules from the full release are already somehow fully-formed and well balanced in the minds of the designers, why release the flawed playtest version in the first place)
-people who talk about the rules driving away prospective new/returning players are told not to/them doing so is invalid since the current rules aren't the final rules (again: this is just a playtest!)
do you see how impossible that is? for the rules to change you have to talk about them, but you can't talk about them because they're subject to change.
also, if the game can't get people interested while it's free, that's a very bad sign, as unless it changes it most certainly wont get people interested with a hardcover book pricetag in the full release.
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Whats the alternative? Making a game for people who aren't interested enough to play it for free?I keep seeing a lot of posts, from both players and actual, real-life Paizo staff, that people need to play the game before providing any feedback.
To quote Paizo CTO Vic Wertz,
Tell us about your actual game play. Theory is all well and good, but everybody’s got theories, and we’ve probably heard most of them already. Tell us how things are actually working in play, not how you think things will work.But we should all keep in mind that the playtest is a game; and if someone is not excited enough to play the game then that is a valid complaint.
We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we argue about on the forums. What matters is how many people buy the rulebook at a bookstore and take it home; and if someone picks up the book and it looks boring, they're not going to reserve judgement until they've played a couple sessions. They're going to put it down, and just go with 5e.
I agree with the OP entirely.
If Paizo only listens to people who played the playtest their results will be hugely biased. I'm starting another game in a week or two and with all our adult responsibilities my BFF and I see no point in wasting precious free time on a game we see as fundamentally flawed.
so, a conundrum presents itself:
-the rules must change or be reorganized/reformatted to avoid driving away prospective new/returning players (either from user-unfriendliness or sheer boredom)
-one assumes the rules will change for the full release...
I don't see people having any trouble talking about the rules. I've already gave a few suggestions for improvement myself The waste of time however is the people who can't even think to give input past I don't like it or this is bad, then of course people that won't even try it but still think they know everything about it.
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We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
That's valid criticism but it's low-quality feedback, ie it's not very useful information.
You're selling a product, you focus on the people interested in your product. Unless you're completely incompetent and you have created something your target audience isn't interested into, the odds probably are that the people who are not interested in even trying your product aren't those you were creating it for.
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We can all argue about whether someone's issues were real or perceived, and we can tell people that the problems they had go away in actual gameplay, but if a person chooses not to play a game because it seems to complex, boring, confusing, bland, tedious, or time-consuming, then that is a valid criticism against that game.
That's valid criticism but it's low-quality feedback, ie it's not very useful information.
You're selling a product, you focus on the people interested in your product. Unless you're completely incompetent and you have created something your target audience isn't interested into, the odds probably are that the people who are not interested in even trying your product aren't those you were creating it for.
Aren't you a 4E fan? The relevant part.
"you're completely incompetent and you have created something your target audience isn't interested into"
You might actually be the 1st honest one if you agree with your won comment lol:).
PF2 would also be better for an OGL successor to 4E than 5E. You would just replace the PF2 classes with AEDU type ones.
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And Vic is probably too nice to spell it out, but most armchair theorists really overestimate theair ability to analyze a system just by reading it. Which, again, is why Paizo would prefer if you actively participate in the playtest by actually playtesting that game.
I don't deny a Playtest is a useful thing. I would just like to point out that a person thinking of running a game for their friends must select a game system to use. There are far too many viable game systems to run each of them through a 6-month audition. Reading (even skimming) rules to determine if they would be a good fit is a normal exercise.
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As for the _whys_, I'd expect to see some of that stuff in blog posts, but I think the best space for some of that is the Paizo Friday twitch shows we'll be doing weekly. A big portion of each show (as with the first one from last Friday) is a live Q&A. I think Jason took every question on Friday, so if you've got something like "please explain why you add level to everything," it might be easier and more instructive to ask it on Friday and let Jason (or whichever designer is on) go off on a tear about it.
Your point about cunning is an interesting one. It's a fun exercise to determine a key word for each class, and then evaluate the design in light of that.
Thank you
I'm not sure if my schedule will permit that. But I'll try.To be clear, the "why did you" question has been addressed by Jason on the boards.
My question is, unfortunately, a little more complex. I'd ask
"In 1E the mechanics of everything came from of evaluation of the pieces, in 2E the abstract concept of level is the most important single quantitative value. Will it be possible for me to play 2E without this abstraction overwhelming the things that are important to me?"
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So yes, 4E was partly produced through incompetence.
I am mildly infamous over on ENWorld as a h4ter. But I see this claim as really disconnected from the marketplace overall.
First, they had an all-star team. That doesn't mean they couldn't fail, but it does mean anyone claiming they failed should triple check to make sure they really know what the intent was.
They nailed their design goals. Which I can't just quickly run down as a list, but can be summarized as "low entry point for new players", "easy to DM", "tactical mechanics over simulation". (No claim that this list is all-inclusive by any means)
They nailed those things and the people who loved 4E LOVED 4E.
Now, you specified adventures, and I can't speak to that. I will say that even during 3E, which had a huge fan base for quite a while, WotC was often mocked for putting out content that didn't stack up to the really good 3PP stuff. (Yes, for every really good 3PP stuff there were 25 crappy 3PP things, but the good stuff set the bar)
So I'm willing to assume you may be completely right about adventures.
But the design itself was brilliant. It was just brilliant design which missed most of the market space.
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So, after reading the rules, my group has chosen not to participate in the play test.
The change to the action system, the way skills are being handled, and the way races have been modified have contributed to this choice.
If the lore is well done, we might buy some books to intigrate with our ongoing 1st edition game.
My group has come to the same conclusion, but the rules and the layout of the rules, after reading them, is not the only issue. My group has 8 players (10 at times). Five of us have bookshelves with every PF1 hardcover made on them, and many of the softcovers and adventure paths.
For us, it's a love of PF1 and an economic choice. Sure the PF2 rules may be free on an SRD, and that won't cost us a thing, but we like PF1, and we've made an investment in the PF1 rulebooks that we aren't willing to overlook. It's that simple really.
Economic impact and utility is a real thing for us as well.
However, I know a lot of people are excited about it, and I hope it does well for Paizo, because at the end of the day, even though it's not for me, I ultimately want Paizo to be successful.
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I have to concur with you, rknop. I really dislike podcasts and streams for disseminating information. Maybe it's a generational thing, but reading is much faster for me. It's easier to reference what was said later. So perhaps a compromise is Paizo could also provide a transcript.
I checked out the Twitch streams yesterday as I was curious how much information could be siloed over there.
I noticed a lot of the GenCon streams were still <10 views a week after posting, so I suspect there's not a ton of crucial stuff being disseminated via Twitch since the audience (at least today) is very small and I imagine Paizo would want to get juicy information out to more than just a few people.
Also, someone (I think it was Erik Mona) said that all the Twitch streams will be archived on YouTube, so you can watch them with captioning turned on.
Hey there folks,
Just to be clear, we are all over the boards reading and talking about threads (even if we are allowing some of them to brew without our direct input), this is one that I felt was important to talk about.
Of course it is important for us to know that you don't find our game exciting enough to play.
There just isn't a lot of direction we can take from that other than "make it more exciting". Which is, of course, something we are always striving to do anyway. Later on in this process we are going to be releasing a swarm of surveys that are not directly tied to the playtest. While many of those will be about specific game systems and engines, there will be one about our layout and information design. This too is important to us, even though I do not suspect we will get too many answers on it, as survey about user design interface is probably not too interesting to most, but that wont stop us from trying.
Just thought I would toss that out there. I hate to see enthusiasts so distraught that they cannot even bring themselves to play. Rest assured that we will be looking into that once we have things rolling here.
This is super encouraging to hear!
My group's on the verge of walking away because while they love the ideas of the game, they find deciphering the rules to be tedious. Most of them have asked if we can switch back to our other game, but we're still going to give it a try tonight. Most of us were worried that the book's layout and wording are fairly finalized. The group went over to the surveys but when they didn't ask about character creation or readability they assumed that that part of the book was fairly complete and got discouraged.
I'll let them know!
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Also, someone (I think it was Erik Mona) said that all the Twitch streams will be archived on YouTube, so you can watch them with captioning turned on.
That doesn't fix the problem. A video with captions is not the same as a text document. The captions allow you to read it without audio that might annoy other people nearby (or be hard for you if you're hearing impaired). But all of the other problems remain. It's a slow serial method of information transfer that is much harder to skim, jump back to review, or reference than text.
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Most of us were worried that the book's layout and wording are fairly finalized.
This is not meant as a jab or belittlement at all. But how could anyone worry that the initial printing of a months-long playtest document is finalized?
Most of us were worried that the book's layout and wording are fairly finalized.This is not meant as a jab or belittlement at all. But how could anyone worry that the initial printing of a months-long playtest document is finalized?
Becuyase it more of an alpha or beta vs a playtest and there is not that much itme left. Paizo have indicated they will change the releases dates but it seems clear they are really pushing some things they want in the game (resonance etc).
1E-2E playtest was over a year (87- 89 release), 5E was 2 years, 3.0 took 3 years in house, 4E was rushed at 2 years.
And how you present things also matters. Consider a mechanic Paizo likes "Hey here is this new mechanics its really great what do you think". They never asked for example do people want resonance or a mechanic limiting items or presented other options.
Consider using resonance as an example vs my sample before.
" Here is this new mechanics resonance, we don't like it much but what do you think?"
Sure you can poll people on what they like but how you push something also matters.
And if its not resonance its something else. There was no survey that I know of along the lines of "hey we are going to fix the spellcaster/martial do you want us to do that. If yes what ideas do you like (list a few).
They have already decided on how they are doing some things with limited time. They might tweak or ditch some if it but there are other ways of doing what they are trying to do.
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So here's one of my problems with 2E. I don't like systems that make me feel trapped to one generic method of play for a given character class or type. I remember Paizo saying they would not be abandoning allowing to you to customize your character. With the playtest I don't see this as an true statement on their part at least from the current rules we have in front of us.
To give but one glaring example in PF2E Golarian is being baked into the core books, but herein lies a problem. Paladin's are supposed to be champions of their deity, I know Paizo says they want to look at removing the alignment limitation but traditionally these have been Lawful Good ones and most playtesters (and people in general because it's part of the cultural zeitgeist) are going to default to Lawful Good. But let's look at the three LG Deities presented: Erastil, Iomedae, and Torag. What are their favored weapons? For Torag it's a warhammer, for Iomedae a longsword, and for Erastil it's a longbow.
Champions of deities with ranged favored weapons can not comprehensively incorporate that weapon into their fighting style. This would be one thing if only the Divine Archer archetype could do that in PF1, but no, a Paladin built solely on the CRB could effectively wield a longbow as their weapon of choice without it significantly impacting the utility of their class abilities.
I don't like that because I've been playing D&D Pathfinder long enough that playing a stereotype as your only option gets boring real quick. It is, in fact, the reason why I was so absolutely disappointed in Starfinder after being so hyped about it, I was looking forward to basically playing a ranged Solarion, but that's basically impossible to pull off because of both the system and class design. And Starfinder had left me leery of PF2, because like Saga Edition was a test of rules later utilized in 4E (though better conceived in that case) I dreaded Starfinder was a prelude to PF2E; likewise, PF2E has left me disillusioned with Paizo's design philosophy as a whole because as is often the case I really regret that my concerns bear out. I hate being right.
If I wanted to play a system that favored streamlining over character options I'd just play 4E or 5E. And I get it, Paizo's not a cooperative, it has a legal obligation to maximize their investor's share values, which can't be done if all your consumers already bought your core products a decade ago and only buy a new copy when that one wears out. But I'd at least have thought, given how Paizo and Pathfinder became what they are, they'd be leery of treading down the same path Wizards did for the same reason. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does often rhyme.
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Ironically, I have been hearing over the years how critical hits (like in 5th Ed) and failures (always seem to meet opposition) are considered outdated design, player-punishing, even (monsters benefit from critical hits for more than PCs), but PF2 has gone with making it a core part of the deal, very surprising move, in today's game-design climate.
This is the first ive heard of that.
True fact!
My coworker loves Starfinder specifically because of the critical effects weapons have.
He even convinced his wife to make characters because of them.
But there are those of us that do, and who have been using them since we played basic dnd. My group still uses the Critical Hit and Fumble Chart from Dragon 39, even though we play PF1. We've been using it since it came out back in the day, no matter what version of the game we've played. We did try the Arms Law and Claw Law critical hit tables back in the early 90s but that was a bit of overkill.