| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
For you, that's normal GM stuff. For me, that's a chore. You're young with no family obligations and ample free time. That'll hopefully change and with that will your view on how much time do you want to spend preparing the game.
I passed 43 last month, so not that young anymore. And I got plenty of stuff to do aside from the full time job. But you don't have much time to prepare stuff, I get that. I just think that you are barking up the wrong tree if you think PF2E will make things easier for you in the long run by forgoing the 3.X skeleton for the new direction the devs seem intent on taking it on. And it only seems to me to be a hope you have, when you, again to me, seem to be treating it as already more of a certainty.
And as for the system blowing up with splats - yeah, sure, but 5e didn't blow up in 3 years and I do sincerely hope that Paizo will adopt a much more sane pace of publishing material, more akin to the one 5e has. With Starfinder around, Paizo has far less financial pressure these days.
That seems to be a pipe dream to me, but since nobody of us has hard evidence what the intended publishing schedule is, I can't disprove your statement, either. I'm just saying that Paizo has had a very full publishing schedule and if they want to keep their current number of employees (which has been expanded significantly because of Starfinder, as James and Adam just explained yesterday in the product discussion for the first module of Return of the Runelords), they have to keep making the same amounts of money that they have until now. Which means publishing a lot of books.
It's +1 to the crit range once you're already hitting on a roll of a 10 (or better). To get the equivalent of a 15-20 crit range you need to be able to hit the enemy on a 5; to get better than 15-20 you need to be hitting the enemy on a 4 (or better). I'm pretty sure the math for PCs in PF2 is tied down hard enough that you're not going to be doing that against any but the weakest mooks.In my opinion at least an additional +1 bonus on a weapon is amazing:
+1 additional bonus on a weapon is +1 to hit, +1 crit range, and +weapon dice to damage; over and above the weapons other characters get using WBL.
That's useful and powerful at all levels. Especially that +1 crit range. In PF1 there were about one or two ways to get crit ranges over 15-20; and they required specific weapons, a confirmation roll and level 20.
That +1 crit range also benefits the extra damage dealt.
In Pathfinder 1st Edition, hitting on a 5 with a weapon with a 15-20 critical hit range means that 80% of the first attacks will hit and 30% of those hits will be crits, so the 80% splits into a 56% chance the first attack will be a regular hit and a 24% chance the first attack will be a critical hit.
In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, hitting on a 5, which means a critical success on 15 or higher, means that 80% of the first attacks will hit, divided into 50% regular successes and 30% critical successes.
The confirmation roll of PF1 makes a difference.
avr is right that hitting on a 5 in PF2 is uncommon: either the party is attacking low-level minions or a high-level boss is attacking the party. That is about as uncommon as a PF1 character with a 18-20 crit range weapon applying an effect that doubles the crit range, such as the Keen Edge spell. More common would be a PF2 character wielding a deadly weapon for an extra damage die on a critical success.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I believe that the sales of PF1 books have slumped so since 5e arrived that even in PF2 has a more relaxed schedule will hopefully be able to bring more moeny than PF1 does.
Again, that rests on a lot of assumptions on your part. Are you sure that Paizo don't want to hire more people? Are you sure that they even plan to have a more relaxed publishing schedule? Are you sure that they won't just start putting out splatbooks with tons of new options at the same rate one year after the new CRB is published?
In regards to the Multilingual feat you mentioned, you only need to be Trained in Soecity
Thank you for the correction. I am not sure how I made that mistake!
It still bites spending a feat on it. But, as you point out, it does let you pull in languages sooner than I had thought.
This is a dangerous line to go down. This is the kind of response that might lead somebody believe the greater sentiment is the opposite of the forum sentiment. Or at least intimate that is the case. Without concrete numbers of active forum users, the active player base size, and any sort of sampling biases of forum users to the wider player base the only conclusion that one can make is that the forum is equally likely to represent aggregate opinion as it is not to.The forums represent just a fraction of PF1 players, though. I've played with or GMd for somewhere around 20 people and only one had an account here, so I'd hardly say the opinions of the forums here are an accurate representation of the community as a whole. Besides that, the PF2 forums alone are pretty split in their opinion of the new edition, and there have been many cases where someone's opinion changed drastically (positively or negatively) once they sat down and played.Well you would be making a wrong assumption. Read my previous post. And you should not make divisive statements with people you disagree with being "5e" and "Fans of Pathfinder" (your words) on the other.The biggest problem is that the game The Rot Grub wants already exists. It's called D&D 5e.
Fans of Pathfinder wanted an updated PF1 with bug fixes and new content. Something that was backwards compatible if you wanted something lost in the change. We wanted PF2 to be what PF1 was to 3.5.
I really didn't mean that in a divisive way.
Look at the thousands of threads about fixing Pathfinder, and you will see the common theme of wanting basically the same game, with the trap options and OP stuff tuned to be more in line with the average.
Most people didn't want a brand new system.
My point was twofold - I disagree with the premise that the forum users are in a majority with an unfavorable opinion of PF2, and I disagree that the forums are an accurate enough representation of the community as a whole to draw conclusions from it in the first place.
Even if we assume that there's a 50% chance of the forums being an accurate representation of the community as a whole then any conclusions drawn from a consensus here are just as likely to be wrong as they are to be right, which makes such conclusions unreliable. Furthermore, as I stated earlier, I disagree that the forums have reached a consensus on the issue in the first place.
I think it's fairly obvious that if someone is having fun with the system. They probably aren't posting on the forums about it.
People with problems with the system are more likely to post about it.
Like me for example. I post very little but I'm very happy with the game. Every one of my players are happy as well, but they don't even have a Paizo account. My favourite aspect of the new rules is that combat is actually fun now instead of a slog. You really feel like you actually have options on your turn if you're not a Wizard.
* The Level 5 Spell Fickle Winds pretty much shuts him down completely
I feel the need to point out that having Cyclonic ammunition (which a forward-thinking archer would have in case of scenarios like that) shuts down the counter to that.
I'd really like to have an alternative to rocket-tag rock-paper-scissors.
I think there is such a thing as having too much freedom, particularly when it comes to games. Having some elements of tight or cohesive design is beneficial, particularly involving things like decision paralysis. I just think that there is a balance between a totally open system and an extremely rigid system.This thread highlights one of the problems I have with the system too. It's a game where you only get to play the characters the designers want you to play rather than the characters you want to play. That's why all the feats went from well-designed general purpose abilities to highly restrictive no-creativity-allowed abilities that you only get by taking the class. The lack of a good multiclass system only exacerbates this.
The alchemist (for example) would be infinitely better if you took the PF1 alchemist, turned all the Discoveries into proper PF1-style feats. Give all the feats the Discovery keyword (and any other applicable keyword such as Combat, maybe add Mutagen and Bomb as appropriate to open up design space) and change the discovery class feature to granting bonus Discovery feats. Fix multiclass spellcasting while your
at it and you've got an Alchemist mark 2 that is really awesome.Similar things could be done with Rogue Powers, rather than having Ninja Tricks and Slayer Talents (and the similar abilities for Investigators and Vigilantes). Turn them all into feats and just give the classes bonus feats that have the right keyword. Rogues would get bonus Trick feats. If you really don't want too much class sharing, then use a variety of keywords. Make some of the Ninja Tricks into Trick feats but others into Ki feats and give the Ninja bonus Trick or Ki feats while the Rogue only gets Trick feats. The important things is the feats are general purpose and anybody can take them if they meet the prerequisites.
Not only that, but the degree of freedom that is enjoyable differs from player to player, and from group to group. Having an open and honest conversation, *before* the campaign starts, about mutual expectations is critical. This, then, will form a compact that everyone involved is more or less bound by. If the agreement is a gritty game of level 10, max, urban explorers, there's not going to be complaints about the lack of holy avengers or vorpal attack elephants without a smack with a newspaper to the snout, one would think.