| kpulv |
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Dear Paizo, I hope this message finds you well.
The following is a bunch of my thoughts, impressions, and a wishlist from my time so far running the Pathfinder Playtest as a game master. Remember that all of this is my humble opinion so don't come at me like you're at a debate club world championship because I probably won't respond.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I've been playing in a PF1 campaign for three years and played a handful of other tabletop rpgs with campaigns that lasted either a few weeks or a few months. Outside of playing a lot of tabletop rpgs, I work on video games and card games.
Before proceeding, gain one grain of salt.
Three Action System
The three action system is obviously the next step for tactical tabletop rpg combat systems. My group has been loving every moment of the combat mostly because of the three action system. The simplicity and flexibility for each turn of an encounter is interesting already at level one, and having every ability in the game be linked to a number of actions is great.
In a big encounter (will try to not spoil anything for those not yet digging into Doomsday Dawn) the sorceress of the party was able move up to the boss, strike with her shillelagh and score a critical hit, and then back away all in one turn. She knew that the boss had already burned his attack of opportunity, and this was just a great moment for the players that would not have been possible in Pathfinder 1 without a large chain of feats.
Character Building
I feel like I've seen a lot of gripes about the character building process, but so far my group dove right into it and had almost zero issues. The issues that did come up for the first part of Doomsday Dawn were mostly caused by typos and mistakes that would later be corrected by the errata.
My one hesitation here though is that it seems like it's very difficult for a character to ever end up with a negative modifier in any stat. This is all my own personal opinion of course, but I always liked it when characters had some sort of drawback and the easiest way to express that was through a negative stat. Of course in other systems with a six attribute core, most of the time a common stat (charisma) ends up being the "dump" stat that everyone ends up putting to 8 or 7 in order to boost their more important stats. I'm not sure if that would be the case in the playtest, but I think it'd be neat if amazing stats weren't the norm starting out. In the same vein, it also feels like easily obtaining an 18 in a stat at level one feels a little too strong, and I wish an 18 was reserved for the first ability boost you get during character progression.
This is my perspective as a player and a game master, but I like feeling at early levels like I'm a wanna be adventure going up against impossible odds, and growing into a compitent character, and I understand a lot of folk don't play that way.
Monster and NPC Building
I love that monsters and NPCs are totally free of the same building rules as the characters. I began to run my games of Pathfinder 1 this way because holy crap I do not want to spend a million years trying to get the stats and feats correct for the monster I want to make just for the players to run it over in three turns anyway and never really care about the underlying math. I feel like this supports more of a "make it up as you go along" style of play which I'm a big fan of.
Hero Points
I love, love, love hero points. I really like how they are integrated with the system from the get go in this playtest so far, but I'd like to see more concrete ways that they can be earned, and also remove all of the "out of game" ways that they can be earned.
I also would like to see more of a way that the entire party could earn them, instead of just handing them out to specific players. This is my perspective as a GM, but I think systems like hero points being handed out to specific players only, without concrete rules on how to earn them, ends up being a positive feedback loop that negatively effects the more shy or introverted players. If Player A does something amazing and flavorful, and really digs into their character as part of a scene, they earn a hero point, and maybe that will inspire Player B to put themselves out there more to also try to earn a hero point, but I don't ever think that is the case. Ultimately it feels like putting on a song and dance to try to appease the GM enough to earn one, especially if the rules are not well defined. The more shy players will fall behind as the more socially forceful ones will shine and earn way more points.
What I would like to see more of is some sort of system that encourages players to engage with the world more, and their characters more, and also a way for them to earn their hero points together as a party.
One idea for Hero Points may be storing them all as a group. If Player A earns a Hero Point, it can be usable for anyone in the party. Alternatively, maybe every player gets one hero point only after the party has secured an amount equal to the number of players in the group. So in a case of a four player game, when the amount of earned Hero Points reaches four, that reserve empties and each player gains one that they can use as they wish.
Also my group plays very, very slowly. We really dig deep into every scene. We flesh out every single NPC, and it's not unusual for our sessions to be mostly in-character conversations and not a single combat happens. Hero Points vanishing at the end of every session does not match our play style at all, so for the playtest I've been having them persist between sessions.
For earning hero points, what if well defined character actions could be used to earn them? Having players engage with the world more. Maybe getting to know an NPC's name and some aspect of their personality would earn a point. If character's had defined flaws, when a character plays into their flaw that would earn them a point. If a character put themselves in danger to help an ally or the greater good, earn a point. (Of course these are all "good" things, but hence the name Hero Point. Maybe Villain Points are needed for an evil campaign!) I think narrative based games have a lot of great systems for this and I would love to see it in Pathfinder.
Lastly as a GM, I love Hero Points for the reason that I can run encounters with high lethality, and know that my players have at least one, or maybe more chances to escape the absolute end of their characters. A chance for characters to spend their points and escape death and gain a chance to escape an encounter with their lives is great for my group's style of play. Enemies can go all out and play smart, and the players have a chance to realize that they are clearly outmatched, and make a sound retreat, instead of realizing too late that the monster they poked is going to kill everyone and is resistant to all of their abilities.
Reactions
I really like the reactions that characters, and monsters, have access to so far from what I've seen. It really helps to have players remain engaged when its not their turn, and I would love to see more systems like this expanded upon. I would dare say that having one reaction per turn does not feel like enough, and it would be amazing if there were more chances here to expand on this system. I know this would blow the complexity up a lot, and would compromise a lot of the balance of reactions so far, but if reactions played on a similar system as actions I wonder where that could go. What if you had three reactions per turn, and certain reactions cost different amounts of reaction? This is probably way too complex, and would be a lot to track, but maybe there's something there! Spend a Hero Point for an extra reaction?!
I like the aspect of players being able to think about, and do things when its not their turn, and especially the reactions that involve defense. Getting attacked now can present interesting opportunities for a number of classes. Reactive shield, nimble dodge, shield block, all great examples of interesting decisions that come up during combat when it's not a player's turn.
I will touch upon Nimble Dodge here for a moment. I don't think it's cool enough. For the rogue in my group it unfortunately has not been relevant a single time. It demands that an enemy roll a very narrow range of numbers for their attack roll, and I would much rather see something like evasion be the baseline reaction for the Rogue and give them an ability to mitigate physical damage when getting hit. That, or the +2 from nimble dodge just isn't enough to matter.
Attacks of Opportunity
I could not be happier with the change of making attacks of opportunity being almost non existent. I'm playing in a game of Pathfinder 1, and running the Pathfinder Playtest, and the combat so far in the Playtest has been so, so freeing. Enemies and player characters being able to (mostly) freely move about the battlefield feels great compared to the, I hate to say it, slog of Pathfinder 1.
Big Ole Wishlist
The following is a bunch of text of things I wish to see, or directions I wish the game to go in!
I would love to see spells really dig deep into the three action system more. Magic missile, heal, and harm, are great. Every spell should be like them!
Make heightening just a global thing for all spells always for every caster.
Please just kill off vancian casting already. The arcanist style from Pathfinder 1 is the future. Give me some spell slots and let me choose spells, and then use any level slot for that spell, and auto heighten it to the slot level. Preparing 3 fireballs to have to cast 3 fireballs is an ancient relic that needs to go.
Remove touch AC and replace it with reflex DC checks. You already have this going on with grapple athletics checks. You have to hit their fortitude DC. Touch AC just feels very out of place with the rest of the system, especially now that armor also increases it. You have this skill to DC system so use the heck out of it!
I wish that all flavor text was decoupled from mechanical text. When an entry reads "This glowing circle sits on your head and looks very shiny in the sun and everyone thinks it looks really cool. It has a bunch of gemstones and ancient celestial glyphs etched into it that read 'he who smelt it, dealt it.' It grants a +2 circumstance bonus to diplomacy skill checks." I just wish it said the part about the diplomacy bonus. When my players and I are trying to skim through rules, especially in the heat of an encounter, we don't care about what the item looks or smells like. Put that in a different part of the entry, with an italiziced font, or something. In fact, my players and I would love a version of the rule book that is just that. Rules. No fluff. Just all the mechanics and the rules. Zero flavor. My players and I love to create our own flavor for everything anyway, so we often ignore what is given to us by the book.
More rules for making our own spells! How many gosh dang mages walk around casting fireball. I want to shoot out lightning balls. Boulder balls. Everything balls! Frameworks for creating various kinds of spells flavored to a specific character idea would be so cool and play into the whole "in pathfinder you can make whatever dang character you want" idea.
A slight rebalance of how Hero Points can be spent. It feels like spending two should be the amount to escape death, and spending one should be the d20 reroll.
I'm starting to understand why skills getting a simple +1 per level of training is important, due to the critical rules, but it does not feel significant or satisfying. I would like to see the +1 system changed to a dice pool type system, where each increase in your level of training becomes an additional d20 that you can roll when performing the skill check, and you take the highest result. I would even consider making untrained in a skill be two d20s, take the lowest.
I wish characters could be bad at things. It feels impossible to be bad at anything in this system. Maybe if untrained skills didn't get the +level bonus this would help here. I agree with the criticisms I see that it makes no sense why a high level character would just be automatically really good at every skill. A frail wizard of 20th level is a god of athletics? Why?
I wish all of the +1, -1, -2, +2, +4 math would just go away forever. What about instead of a +2, you just get a +d4? What if instead of +4 you get a +d8? +d10? I'm not sure what the solution is here, but I know that once you get to about level seven or eight in Pathfinder 1, the game slows to a crawl as everyone every turn is calculating out some stupid amount of math, and everyone knows its harder to do math when you're in a panic because you and your allies are fighting for your lives against the embodiment of evil for the fate of the universe. Abandon modifier math, and dig into dice more!
Kill the critical failure result of stabilizing someone with a medicine check. Good lord. It already takes so much to even be compitent enough with the expensive tools to even attempt this skill, so why is there a risk that you'll kill your friend with it? When you critically fail an attack roll you dont stab yourself with your own scimitar.
Lean into Hero Points even more. More uses for them. What if a single Hero Point could save your shield from a dent? What if you could resist a monster grabbing you with a Hero Point? What if you could use a Hero Point to do a single action without provoking reactions? What if you could half the damage you just took by spending a Hero Point? Hero Points!!
Destroy alignment already. It's so weird and more and more I just see it as an excuse for characters to act stupid. It's a relic. Kill it! Some sort of karma or corruption system might be more fun. Do bad stuff? Gain corruption. Do good stuff? Gain karma. Each can do something for you. I don't know. I feel like the nine alignments are limiting in a bad way.
Give player characters a way to rest that doesn't involve ending the adventuring day. The short rest mechanic is one of the things I love from 5e, and I think something similar to it would work great here. Some sort of pool of healing that any player character can use, and it costs time to use it.
Consider moving toward the Stamina, Health, and Resolve system from Starfinder. Okay so I haven't played Starfinder at all, but that system seems really cool. Stamina is something you can get back easily, but taking damage on your Health is scary as heck. Sounds great! Why not use it again here? It seems like an amazing system the more I read about it! Kill the past! Move forward!
Fully embrace Resonance, or replace it. Resonance seems like a great concept and I like the idea of it, but it feels like only like half of the book cares about it. Items still retain X uses a day in some cases and everything always costs one point. Items still have slots? I don't know. It seems really weird. Why even make items? Just give us everything an item can be made with and let us make our own. What if we don't want a cloak that can make us invisible and instead we want gloves that can. It seems like theres a big opportunity to make magic items incredibly streamlined and simplified in a way that lets players really express whatever flavor they want.
Consider leaning more into a system that removes the feeling of wasting your turn. What if there was a type of strike that anyone could do where it was something like: you cannot critically succeed, on a failure you deal your damage modifier in damage. Sort of like a reserved strike that always hits for minimum damage. Or give characters more minor things to do that auotmatically succeed. What if the ranger could point out a target for everyone and give all their allies a bonus to hit it? Some more "cannot fail at this" options that would make players feel like they dont waste a turn where they don't change the game state at all. I think things like the four degree success system help a lot here. I play a caster in my Pathfinder 1 game, and it casting an offensive spell is just the worst. Having to hit the thing, overcome its SR, then it still getts a save. Why bother when I can cast a buff or a heal that I know will always work? I think honestly the amount of successful offensive spells I have cast in my multi-year career as a caster in Pathfinder 1 is under 10%, and the other 90% feels like I did absolutely nothing except waste a turn and a spell.
Simplify the conditions. I don't have a proposed solution here but it feels like there are a lot of conditions that could just be rolled into common ones.
Make getting knocked out have a greater impact, but after the battle. Maybe after a character is knocked out, after they rest, something happens to them, or something about them changes. Something that they then have to deal with. Is it mechanical or just flavor? I don't know, but I like the idea of death not being the worst thing that can happen to a character.
Embrace crazier combat abilities and options. What if a fighter could grab an enemy and throw them into a different tile? What if they could themselves vault over an enemy and end up on the other side of them? What if as a reaction a character could throw themselves in front of another? I'm talking about making stuff like this accessible at earlier levels. I feel like I just want more interesting options available to more classes during combat as the baseline, and have more crazy powerful stuff show up later. I want more things that will make battles less likely to devolve into "everyone stand in their tile and attack 3 times for the next 10 rounds."
Make options outside of "deal as much damage as possible per round" more enticing. This goes along with the previous one. Right now there are different things that characters can do, but are any of them ever going to be more effective than just "kill the thing before it kills us" which translates to "run up and attack as many times as you can." Everything in the game boils down to one, single thing: damage. A thing that does damage will always, 100%, be better than a thing that does not. Dealing with a threat by removing its ability to threaten you will always be the most effective strategy. Is there anything that can be done to make alternate strategies work? The playtest book and Pathfinder 1 more so are full of various things you can do on your turn, but everyone is always just going to use the few things that deal the most damage per round. I think a good example of this working already is raising your shield as an action. Do you take the -10 to hit, or do you raise your shield? It's an interesting question! But so far I've only seen this at low levels. Will it matter to get a small boost in AC when you're starring down the barrel of an enemy that has a +30 to hit? Not sure!
Remove immunity to critical hits. One of the core facets of this new system is critical hits. Critical hits are fun, and they are scary. They are great. Immunity to critical hits is never, ever met with the response of "wow interesting, let's change our strategy against this fascinating enemy!" it's always "wow this sucks." I would be all for giving things a resistance to critical hits much like how resistances to damage work. For example, you critically hit the ooze? You still get the crit, but it takes 5 less damage from a crit, or something like that. (Again these proposed changes are not 100% thought out so please don't latch onto the fact that what if you deal less than 5 damage with a crit so you deal no damage so you would have been better off not critting it.)
Consider multiple health pools for big monsters. Instead of a big baddie having just 40 health points, what if it had two pools of 20? The first pool of 20 must be at 0 for the second pool to take any damage, and once all the pools are at 0, the creature is down. What I'm looking for here is to strike a balance between letting players do massive amounts of damage with their crazy builds, especially on a critical hit, but not let a big boss fight end in one round anti-climatically when the barbarian does 50 damage at level 1 with a critical hit with a pick. My players scored a big critical hit against a boss in Doomsday Dawn, and it was great, but then the next player in the turn order hit the boss and he went down. The players were relieved, but there was also this disappointment in the room as well. That's it? Of course the critical hit did well over half the boss's health in damage, but now the boss just seemed like a push over and there wasn't much satisfaction with his defeat.
Consider a system where all numbers dont increase with level, especially hit points. What kind of world would it be if a high level character could still be stabbed at a tavern and be in real danger? I kinda think it'd be pretty fun but maybe a vast majority of pathfinder players would not agree. A character walking around with 200 hitpoints is kinda baffling to me and really really hard for me to reason out narratively. (For example the other night in my Pathfinder 1 game, our characters were hit by grenades that dealt 30-ish damage, while we're all sitting at around 100-150 max hp. The discovery of these grenades was supposed to feel like this very significant thing, but ultimately our characters didn't care because they barely cause a scratch on us. Of course there's also cleric's feather fall. Jump off a sky scraper, take your 20d6 damage, and heal yourself back up good as new!)
Embrace board game, card game, and yes, even video game influence. The last letter of rpg stands for game. We are playing a game. I like how the Playtest so far feels, and the complaints about it feeling like a video game that I see just baffle me. So far I'm able to have the same narrative, character driven story experience that I've had in almost every other rpg that I've played, so really not sure why making the system more clearly defined and having crisper rules and restricitons could possibly make the experience worse. What is one of the most successful recent board games? Gloomhaven. Pretty much a condensed, distilled tactical combat experience that you'd find in an rpg. Give me a cool system, and me and my players will add the story and flavor ourselves.
More examples in the book, please! There's a lot of things in the book to digest and it's an entirely new system. Experience with other rpgs is a bonus, but it's still pretty tough. Some sections of the book have brief examples of how to use the rules with little example scenarios, and these are the best!! After the rules about shield dents and shield block, a little example block of "So and so is hit by an attack, and decides to use their heavy wooden shield to block some of the incoming damage. The damage is 5, and they reduce it by the shield's hardness" etc etc. More examples would clear up a lot of the confusion I think!
Make playing a buffer a little bit more interesting. I like buffing my allies in combat, but it still feels like I'm totally disconnected from the outcome. Sure I'm giving them a bonus, but they're still the ones getting to do the cool rolls. What if there was a buff system where I got to roll my buff along with their attack roll? They roll their d20 to hit, and I roll my d4 boost along with them. Would also do a lot to keep players engaged outside of their turn! (Note that this would probably involve replacing a lot of modifier math with additional dice rolling.)
Embrace the gosh dang internet. I wish the playtest was available as an official srd from the start. I'm not sure what goes into putting the books together, and how the data for the books is laid out behind the scenes, but if the playtest was in some sort of explorable wiki format on the paizo website, or even a download of just a bunch of static html, it would be so much easier to digest. I dare say it would be 10 million times easier to digest. Books are awful for rule systems. PDFs are slightly better with the ability to control F. The community is translating the books to an SRD, but why? You have all of the source material to just do it yourselves! Updates would also be a breeze. The update docs are a nightmare, and I don't know how I can put it more gently than that. The whole "add the following to sentence 3 in paragraph 2 just before the word 'and'" is absolute insanity in the year of 2018.
That's all for now! Again I want to reinforce that my players and I are having a blast and I am loving the Playtest for a lot of reasons. I'm glad to see so many adjustments and updates rolling out in response to player feedback, and I'm excited to see where it goes in the coming months.
| Scythia |
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Consider multiple health pools for big monsters. Instead of a big baddie having just 40 health points, what if it had two pools of 20? The first pool of 20 must be at 0 for the second pool to take any damage, and once all the pools are at 0, the creature is down. What I'm looking for here is to strike a balance between letting players do massive amounts of damage with their crazy builds, especially on a critical hit, but not let a big boss fight end in one round anti-climatically when the barbarian does 50 damage at level 1 with a critical hit with a pick. My players scored a big critical hit against a boss in Doomsday Dawn, and it was great, but then the next player in the turn order hit the boss and he went down. The players were relieved, but there was also this disappointment in the room as well. That's it? Of course the critical hit did well over half the boss's health in damage, but now the boss just seemed like a push over and there wasn't much satisfaction with his defeat.
You have not yet seen my final form!
I like it.
| Tridus |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree with a lot of what you said, but one thing in particular stands out:
I wish the playtest was available as an official srd from the start. I'm not sure what goes into putting the books together, and how the data for the books is laid out behind the scenes, but if the playtest was in some sort of explorable wiki format on the paizo website, or even a download of just a bunch of static html, it would be so much easier to digest. I dare say it would be 10 million times easier to digest.
A million times this. The biggest problem I had in character creation was having to look up a list of options on one page, then having to flip 200 pages in a PDF to see what it did, then go back to the list, then to the next thing... it takes forever and it feels clunky as hell. I ended up using two computers at the same time so I could have more screens.
This is what made character creation hard.
| Rethgaal RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32 |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Wow, I think giving bosses/big monsters multiple pools of HP is probably one of the most inspired ideas I've heard in a long time. My players got to the final fight of The Lost Star a couple weeks ago, and basically just rolled over on the final boss once they got in close with a good crit (the random giant rat in the fight managed to tank them in a hallway for like four rounds, it was hilarious), despite there being only one real damage dealer in the party (rogue).
I might also suggest coupling this idea with a "revenge" mechanic on certain fights - once one pool of HP is expended, the monster jumps initiative to lash out at the party with a special attack/spell/something - since depending on how initiative works out, the party might still roflstomp the boss despite the HP separation. I would definitely not suggest this be used for every monster/fight with a pooled HP system, since it could get pretty dickish very quickly.
I also really like the training level system proposed. Advantage/disadvantage in 5e is one mechanic I think more designers should steal and incorporate into their systems. I think your suggestion gets a little wonky with weapon attacks though - high level fighters suddenly roll 4d20 for one attack, which seems a little unnecessary. Maybe combine with the "eliminate the +1, -1..." suggestion:
- Untrained: roll 2d20, take the lower
- Trained: roll 1d20
- Expert: roll 2d20, take the better
- Master: roll 2d20, take the better, +1d4
- Legendary: roll 2d20, take the better, +1d8
Something like that perhaps.
| Greylurker |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would like the Class feat to break down into Basic and Advanced, instead of the current Level Gating set up.
Also PF1 allowed for different power tiers of campaign by changing how many points you had to buy attributes. As GM I would use either 15 or 20 depending on what style of game i planned to run but there is no option to adjust starting abilities like that in PF2
| kpulv_ |
Thanks for the responses! I wasn't sure if I'd get any to be honest haha.
So it appears my other account has been destroyed? I can't log into my original account, and I can no longer see my original post... so I guess I'll post it again:
Dear Paizo, I hope this message finds you well.
The following is a bunch of my thoughts, impressions, and a wishlist from my time so far running the Pathfinder Playtest as a game master. Remember that all of this is my humble opinion so don't come at me like you're at a debate club world championship because I probably won't respond.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I've been playing in a PF1 campaign for three years and played a handful of other tabletop rpgs. Outside of playing a lot of tabletop rpgs, I work on video games and card games.
Before proceeding, gain one grain of salt.
Three Action System
The three action system is obviously the next step for tactical tabletop rpg combat systems. My group has been loving every moment of the combat mostly because of the three action system. The simplicity and flexibility for each turn of an encounter is interesting already at level one, and having every ability in the game be linked to a number of actions is great.In a big encounter (will try to not spoil anything for those not yet digging into Doomsday Dawn) the sorceress of the party was able move up to the boss, strike with her shillelagh and score a critical hit, and then back away all in one turn. She knew that the boss had already burned his attack of opportunity, and this was just a great moment for the players that would not have been possible in Pathfinder 1 without a large chain of feats.
Character Building
I feel like I've seen a lot of gripes about the character building process, but so far my group dove right into it and had almost zero issues. The issues that did come up for the first part of Doomsday Dawn were mostly caused by typos and mistakes that would later be corrected by the errata.My one hesitation here though is that it seems like it's very difficult for a character to ever end up with a negative modifier in any stat. This is all my own personal opinion of course, but I always liked it when characters had some sort of drawback and the easiest way to express that was through a negative stat. Of course in other systems with a six attribute core, most of the time a common stat (charisma) ends up being the "dump" stat that everyone ends up putting to 8 or 7 in order to boost their more important stats. I'm not sure if that would be the case in the playtest, but I think it'd be neat if amazing stats weren't the norm starting out. In the same vein, it also feels like easily obtaining an 18 in a stat at level one feels a little too strong, and I wish an 18 was reserved for the first ability boost you get during character progression.
This is my perspective as a player and a game master, but I like feeling at early levels like I'm a wanna be adventure going up against impossible odds, and growing into a compitent character, and I understand a lot of folk don't play that way.
Monster and NPC Building
I love that monsters and NPCs are totally free of the same building rules as the characters. I began to run my games of Pathfinder 1 this way because holy crap I do not want to spend a million years trying to get the stats and feats correct for the monster I want to make just for the players to run it over in three turns anyway and never really care about the underlying math. I feel like this supports more of a "make it up as you go along" style of play which I'm a big fan of.Hero Points
I love, love, love hero points. I really like how they are integrated with the system from the get go in this playtest so far, but I'd like to see more concrete ways that they can be earned, and also remove all of the "out of game" ways that they can be earned.I also would like to see more of a way that the entire party could earn them, instead of just handing them out to specific players. This is my perspective as a GM, but I think systems like hero points being handed out to specific players only, without concrete rules on how to earn them, ends up being a positive feedback loop that negatively effects the more shy or introverted players. If Player A does something amazing and flavorful, and really digs into their character as part of a scene, they earn a hero point, and maybe that will inspire Player B to put themselves out there more to also try to earn a hero point, but I don't ever think that is the case. Ultimately it feels like putting on a song and dance to try to appease the GM enough to earn one, especially if the rules are not well defined. The more shy players will fall behind as the more socially forceful ones will shine and earn way more points.
What I would like to see more of is some sort of system that encourages players to engage with the world more, and their characters more, and also a way for them to earn their hero points together as a party.
One idea for Hero Points may be storing them all as a group. If Player A earns a Hero Point, it can be usable for anyone in the party. Alternatively, maybe every player gets one hero point only after the party has secured an amount equal to the number of players in the group. So in a case of a four player game, when the amount of earned Hero Points reaches four, that reserve empties and each player gains one that they can use as they wish.
Also my group plays very, very slowly. We really dig deep into every scene. We flesh out every single NPC, and it's not unusual for our sessions to be mostly in-character conversations and not a single combat happens. Hero Points vanishing at the end of every session does not match our play style at all, so for the playtest I've been having them persist between sessions.
For earning hero points, what if well defined character actions could be used to earn them? Having players engage with the world more. Maybe getting to know an NPC's name and some aspect of their personality would earn a point. If character's had defined flaws, when a character plays into their flaw that would earn them a point. If a character put themselves in danger to help an ally or the greater good, earn a point. (Of course these are all "good" things, but hence the name Hero Point. Maybe Villain Points are needed for an evil campaign!) I think narrative based games have a lot of great systems for this and I would love to see it in Pathfinder.
Lastly as a GM, I love Hero Points for the reason that I can run encounters with high lethality, and know that my players have at least one, or maybe more chances to escape the absolute end of their characters. A chance for characters to spend their points and escape death and gain a chance to escape an encounter with their lives is great for my group's style of play. Enemies can go all out and play smart, and the players have a chance to realize that they are clearly outmatched, and make a sound retreat, instead of realizing too late that the monster they poked is going to kill everyone and is resistant to all of their abilities.
Reactions
I really like the reactions that characters, and monsters, have access to so far from what I've seen. It really helps to have players remain engaged when its not their turn, and I would love to see more systems like this expanded upon. I would dare say that having one reaction per turn does not feel like enough, and it would be amazing if there were more chances here to expand on this system. I know this would blow the complexity up a lot, and would compromise a lot of the balance of reactions so far, but if reactions played on a similar system as actions I wonder where that could go. What if you had three reactions per turn, and certain reactions cost different amounts of reaction? This is probably way too complex, and would be a lot to track, but maybe there's something there! Spend a Hero Point for an extra reaction?!I like the aspect of players being able to think about, and do things when its not their turn, and especially the reactions that involve defense. Getting attacked now can present interesting opportunities for a number of classes. Reactive shield, nimble dodge, shield block, all great examples of interesting decisions that come up during combat when it's not a player's turn.
I will touch upon Nimble Dodge here for a moment. I don't think it's cool enough. For the rogue in my group it unfortunately has not been relevant a single time. It demands that an enemy roll a very narrow range of numbers for their attack roll, and I would much rather see something like evasion be the baseline reaction for the Rogue and give them an ability to mitigate physical damage when getting hit. That, or the +2 from nimble dodge just isn't enough to matter.
Attacks of Opportunity
I could not be happier with the change of making attacks of opportunity being almost non existent. I'm playing in a game of Pathfinder 1, and running the Pathfinder Playtest, and the combat so far in the Playtest has been so, so freeing. Enemies and player characters being able to (mostly) freely move about the battlefield feels great compared to the, I hate to say it, slog of Pathfinder 1.Big Ole Wishlist
The following is a bunch of text of things I wish to see, or directions I wish the game to go in!I would love to see spells really dig deep into the three action system more. Magic missile, heal, and harm, are great. Every spell should be like them!
Make heightening just a global thing for all spells always for every caster.
Please just kill off vancian casting already. The arcanist style from Pathfinder 1 is the future. Give me some spell slots and let me choose spells, and then use any level slot for that spell, and auto heighten it to the slot level.
Remove touch AC and replace it with reflex DC checks. You already have this going on with grapple athletics checks. You have to hit their fortitude DC. Touch AC just feels very out of place with the rest of the system, especially now that armor also increases it. You have this skill to DC system so use the heck out of it!
I wish that all flavor text was decoupled from mechanical text. When an entry reads "This glowing circle sits on your head and looks very shiny in the sun and everyone thinks it looks really cool. It has a bunch of gemstones and ancient celestial glyphs etched into it that read 'he who smelt it, dealt it.' It grants a +2 circumstance bonus to diplomacy skill checks." I just wish it said the part about the diplomacy bonus. When my players and I are trying to skim through rules, especially in the heat of an encounter, we don't care about what the item looks or smells like. Put that in a different part of the entry, with an italiziced font, or something. In fact, my players and I would love a version of the rule book that is just that. Rules. No fluff. Just all the mechanics and the rules. Zero flavor. My players and I love to create our own flavor for everything anyway, so we often ignore what is given to us by the book.
More rules for making our own spells! How many gosh dang mages walk around casting fireball. I want to shoot out lightning balls. Boulder balls. Everything balls! Frameworks for creating various kinds of spells flavored to a specific character idea would be so cool and play into the whole "in pathfinder you can make whatever dang character you want" idea.
A slight rebalance of how Hero Points can be spent. It feels like spending two should be the amount to escape death, and spending one should be the d20 reroll.
I'm starting to understand why skills getting a simple +1 per level of training is important, due to the critical rules, but it does not feel significant or satisfying. I would like to see the +1 system changed to a dice pool type system, where each increase in your level of training becomes an additional d20 that you can roll when performing the skill check, and you take the highest result. I would even consider making untrained in a skill be two d20s, take the lowest.
I wish characters could be bad at things. It feels impossible to be bad at anything in this system. Maybe if untrained skills didn't get the +level bonus this would help here. I agree with the criticisms I see that it makes no sense why a high level character would just be automatically really good at every skill. A frail wizard of 20th level is a god of athletics? Why?
I wish all of the +1, -1, -2, +2, +4 math would just go away forever. What about instead of a +2, you just get a +d4? What if instead of +4 you get a +d8? +d10? I'm not sure what the solution is here, but I know that once you get to about level seven or eight in Pathfinder 1, the game slows to a crawl as everyone every turn is calculating out some stupid amount of math, and everyone knows its harder to do math when you're in a panic because you and your allies are fighting for your lives against the embodiment of evil for the fate of the universe. Abandon modifier math, and dig into dice more!
Kill the critical failure result of stabilizing someone with a medicine check. Good lord. It already takes so much to even be compitent enough with the expensive tools to even attempt this skill, so why is there a risk that you'll kill your friend with it? When you critically fail an attack roll you dont stab yourself with your own scimitar.
Lean into Hero Points even more. More uses for them. What if a single Hero Point could save your shield from a dent? What if you could resist a monster grabbing you with a Hero Point? What if you could use a Hero Point to do a single action without provoking reactions? What if you could half the damage you just took by spending a Hero Point? Hero Points!!
Destroy alignment already. It's so weird and more and more I just see it as an excuse for characters to act stupid. It's a relic. Kill it! Some sort of karma or corruption system might be more fun. Do bad stuff? Gain corruption. Do good stuff? Gain karma. Each can do something for you. I don't know. I feel like the nine alignments are limiting in a bad way.
Give player characters a way to rest that doesn't involve ending the adventuring day. The short rest mechanic is one of the things I love from 5e, and I think something similar to it would work great here. Some sort of pool of healing that any player character can use, and it costs time to use it.
Consider moving toward the Stamina, Health, and Resolve system from Starfinder. Okay so I haven't played Starfinder at all, but that system seems really cool. Stamina is something you can get back easily, but taking damage on your Health is scary as heck. Sounds great! Why not use it again here? It seems like an amazing system the more I read about it! Kill the past! Move forward!
Fully embrace Resonance, or replace it. Resonance seems like a great concept and I like the idea of it, but it feels like only like half of the book cares about it. Items still retain X uses a day in some cases and everything always costs one point. Items still have slots? I don't know. It seems really weird. Why even make items? Just give us everything an item can be made with and let us make our own. What if we don't want a cloak that can make us invisible and instead we want gloves that can. It seems like theres a big opportunity to make magic items incredibly streamlined and simplified in a way that lets players really express whatever flavor they want.
Give more options that give the players the ability to do things without risking wasting their entire turn. What if there was a type of strike that anyone could do where it was something like: you cannot critically succeed, on a failure you deal your damage modifier in damage. Sort of like a reserved strike that always hits for minimum damage. Or give characters more minor things to do that automatically succeed. What if the ranger could point out a target for everyone and give all their allies a bonus to hit it? Some more "cannot fail at this" options that would make players feel like they dont waste a turn where they don't change the game state at all. I think things like the four degree success system help a lot here. I play a caster in my Pathfinder 1 game, and it casting an offensive spell is just the worst. Having to hit the thing, overcome its SR, then it still getts a save. Why bother when I can cast a buff or a heal that I know will always work? I think honestly the amount of successful offensive spells I have cast in my multi-year career as a caster in Pathfinder 1 is under 10%, and the other 90% feels like I did absolutely nothing except waste a turn and a spell.
Simplify the conditions. I don't have a proposed solution here but it feels like there are a lot of conditions that could just be rolled into common ones.
Make getting knocked out have a greater impact, but after the battle. Maybe after a character is knocked out, after they rest, something happens to them, or something about them changes. Something that they then have to deal with. Is it mechanical or just flavor? I don't know, but I like the idea of death not being the worst thing that can happen to a character.
Embrace crazier combat abilities and options. What if a fighter could grab an enemy and throw them into a different tile? What if they could themselves vault over an enemy and end up on the other side of them? What if as a reaction a character could throw themselves in front of another? I'm talking about making stuff like this accessible at earlier levels. I feel like I just want more interesting options available to more classes during combat as the baseline, and have more crazy powerful stuff show up later. I want more things that will make battles less likely to devolve into "everyone stand in their tile and attack 3 times for the next 10 rounds."
Make options outside of "deal as much damage as possible per round" more enticing. This goes along with the previous one. Right now there are different things that characters can do, but are any of them ever going to be more effective than just "kill the thing before it kills us" which translates to "run up and attack as many times as you can." Everything in the game boils down to one, single thing: damage. A thing that does damage will always, 100%, be better than a thing that does not. Dealing with a threat by removing its ability to threaten you will always be the most effective strategy. Is there anything that can be done to make alternate strategies work? The playtest book and Pathfinder 1 more so are full of various things you can do on your turn, but everyone is always just going to use the few things that deal the most damage per round. I think a good example of this working already is raising your shield as an action. Do you take the -10 to hit, or do you raise your shield? It's an interesting question! But so far I've only seen this at low levels. Will it matter to get a small boost in AC when you're starring down the barrel of an enemy that has a +30 to hit? Not sure!
Remove immunity to critical hits. One of the core facets of this new system is critical hits. Critical hits are fun, and they are scary. They are great. Immunity to critical hits is never, ever met with the response of "wow interesting, let's change our strategy against this fascinating enemy!" it's always "wow this sucks." I would be all for giving things a resistance to critical hits much like how resistances to damage work. For example, you critically hit the ooze? You still get the crit, but it takes 5 less damage from a crit, or something like that. (Again these proposed changes are not 100% thought out so please don't latch onto the fact that what if you deal less than 5 damage with a crit so you deal no damage so you would have been better off not critting it.)
Consider multiple health pools for big monsters. Instead of a big baddie having just 40 health points, what if it had two pools of 20? The first pool of 20 must be at 0 for the second pool to take any damage, and once all the pools are at 0, the creature is down. What I'm looking for here is to strike a balance between letting players do massive amounts of damage with their crazy builds, especially on a critical hit, but not let a big boss fight end in one round anticlimatically when the barbarian does 50 damage at level 1 with a critical hit with a pick. My players scored a big critical hit against a boss in Doomsday Dawn, and it was great, but then the next player in the turn order hit the boss and he went down. The players were relieved, but there was also this disappointment in the room as well. That's it? Of course the critical hit did well over half the boss's health in damage, but now the boss just seemed like a push over and there wasn't much satisfaction with his defeat.
Consider a system where all numbers dont increase with level, especially hit points. What kind of world would it be if a high level character could still be stabbed at a tavern and be in real danger? I kinda think it'd be pretty fun but maybe a vast majority of pathfinder players would not agree. A character walking around with 200 hitpoints is kinda baffling to me and really really hard for me to reason out narratively. (For example the other night in my Pathfinder 1 game, our characters were hit by grenades that dealt 30-ish damage, while we're all sitting at around 100-150 max hp. The discovery of these grenades was supposed to feel like this very significant thing, but ultimately our characters didn't care because they barely cause a scratch on us. Of course there's also cleric's feather fall. Jump off a sky scraper, take your 20d6 damage, and heal yourself back up good as new!)
Embrace board game, card game, and yes, even video game influence. The last letter of rpg stands for game. We are playing a game. I like how the Playtest so far feels, and the complaints about it feeling like a video game that I see just baffle me. So far I'm able to have the same narrative, character driven story experience that I've had in almost every other rpg that I've played, so really not sure why making the system more clearly defined and having crisper rules and restricitons could possibly make the experience worse. What is one of the most successful recent board games? Gloomhaven. Pretty much a condensed, distilled tactical combat experience that you'd find in an rpg. Give me a cool system, and me and my players will add the story and flavor ourselves.
More examples in the book, please! There's a lot of things in the book to digest and it's an entirely new system. Experience with other rpgs is a bonus, but it's still pretty tough. Some sections of the book have brief examples of how to use the rules with little example scenarios, and these are the best!! After the rules about shield dents and shield block, a little example block of "So and so is hit by an attack, and decides to use their heavy wooden shield to block some of the incoming damage. The damage is 5, and they reduce it by the shield's hardness" etc etc. More examples would clear up a lot of the confusion I think!
Embrace the gosh dang internet. I wish the playtest was available as an official srd from the start. I'm not sure what goes into putting the books together, and how the data for the books is laid out behind the scenes, but if the playtest was in some sort of explorable wiki format on the paizo website, or even a download of just a bunch of static html, it would be so much easier to digest. I dare say it would be 10 million times easier to digest. Books are awful for rule systems. PDFs are slightly better with the ability to control F. The community is translating the books to an SRD, but why? You have all of the source material to just do it yourselves! Updates would also be a breeze. The update docs are a nightmare, and I don't know how I can put it more gently than that. The whole "add the following to sentence 3 in paragraph 2 just before the word 'and'" is absolute insanity in the year of 2018.
That's all for now! Again I want to reinforce that my players and I are having a blast and I am loving the Playtest for a lot of reasons. I'm glad to see so many adjustments and updates rolling out in response to player feedback, and I'm excited to see where it goes in the coming months.
words
Yeah! for the dice rolling, I think rolling 4d20 might get a little wacky for attack rolls for sure, but maybe there's another way to turn it into dice without making it nuts.
What if it were something more like...
U: 2d20 lowest
T: 1d20
E: 2d20 highest
M: 2d20 highest + d4
L: 2d20 highest + 2d4
Again, might be wacky, and also hard to keep track of in the same way that modifier math is tough, and now we're in a system where people need multiple d20s and multiple d4s, and it can be trickier to acquire the dice needed (unless everyone at the table is sharing.)
Also I really like your revenge mechanic idea. It would be cool if bosses had something like legendary actions/reactions that were triggered as free actions under different conditions. Like the big ole red dragon has something like
Vengeful Overdrive
[[F]] Trigger: A health pool of the red dragon reaches 0.The red dragon takes an additional turn after the current creature's turn.
Seems pretty crazy, but I want crazy. I want monsters to bend and break the rules in ways that keeps players on their toes all the time. Legendary actions are great in 5e to balance out action economy, and so far reactions on certain creatures seem like a step in this direction, but I'm wondering if it is going to be enough at higher levels?
| Vic Ferrari |
Seems pretty crazy, but I want crazy. I want monsters to bend and break the rules in ways that keeps players on their toes all the time. Legendary actions are great in 5e to balance out action economy, and so far reactions on certain creatures seem like a step in this direction, but I'm wondering if it is going to be enough at higher levels?
Yes, Legendary Actions are very cool, but they're not quite generous enough (vs. party of 5+), and Legendary monsters should have max hit points, luckily both are dead easy to adjust, that's 5th Ed's greatest strength, for me: hackability/tweaks, converting, etc.