SnipThat's not really optimal. Nobody actually needs Str 20 at 1st and taking it is almost always a mistake, IMO. But yes, you can hit 30 in both on a very focused Barbarian...which would be why I mentioned that, using the treasure it starts with, you can give it a Belt/Potions in the same way and give it 34s.
Really? I always go for 20 Str when I'm going for a big beefy character, and it's usually worked out quite well for me. That's besides the point though, as is buffing the monsters. The point is that in PF1e a PC character can reach the same level of physical prowess as a fairly beefy monster. Of course that's not true in all cases, as there's monsters with stats way above and beyond what a character can reasonably reach without going into one of the aforementioned super optimized builds, but a Barbarian striding into battle with legendarily high strength and endurance is well within the realm of possibility.
Now in PF2e that's actually impossible, because stat boosts are just gone. I get why, having to keep track of damage, attack, skill, and carrying capacity changes when your strength goes up and down is something that could probably stand to be streamlined. Instead though all those effects get split up between various effects and abilities, so for example damage increases come from Rage, Badger Rage, Enlarge, and... I think nothing else? Then if you want to get the attack improvements you need to go to other stuff, and then for the skills and carrying capacity you have to go for even more stuff, and etc. So in PF2e it's possible to have the equivalent of 30 strength, but it's way more work to do. You can consider it an optics thing since I think it might still be doable at that level.
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Now see in my opinion and a bit of testing..., it's not. You still have feat Tax. It's called Fighter Dedication but it's a feat tax. Lemme try to expand my thoughts on this.
PF1 had feat taxes to just get started, yes. But with all the floating bonuses, you could find a way around some of the issues. Rogue has low BAB? Give them a spell, a wand, magic gear and while they aren't the stupid uber gods swinging with like +30 to hit or something, they'd be good enough to play.
Meanwhile, PF2 doesn't expect you to push the numbers. But you're also not rewarded for sitting there either. You can use a bow, but you also miss out on all the Bow actions. Unless You're fighter, or Ranger. Maybe a little Rogue. So you're always going to be behind them. You CAN use a bow, but being...
That's the difference we are trying to explain to you though. In PF1E you need the bow feats to be viable. In PF2 you don't need them. You can just upgrade a bow and keep your dex high and stay completely viable. Paladins make great archers. They can get experts in bows at level 5. They can heal themselves for one action. They can get Blade Ally that let's them add a free Weapon Property to their bow. At level 6 they can get blade of justice that will let them boost their damage against evil creatures. You don't need the fighter dedication to make it viable. If you want less paladin abilities (such as oaths and mercy) you can spend your class feats on fighter dedication to get even more bow damaging feats. But it's by no means required.
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<snipped a whole lot of stuff about how wrong I am>
By my definition of gameplay, you play oppositionally. You don't trust your GM to play fair, and you want rules to constrain their ability to do that. If my players don't trust me to respect them enough to care about what they consider important and run the game in an evenhanded way, then they are with the wrong GM.
I've had the incredibly painful experience of having to ask a player to leave because they just could not accept that I wasn't secretly out to screw them over at some point. I tried for months to make it work, and the constant adversarial mistrust destroyed all my enjoyment in running games.
I've also played in games where the GM is on one team and the players are on another. I just don't do that anymore. It's not fun. If I have to have rules armor to shield me from expected GM malfeasance, I need to go play video games or something and not be at that table.
I am totally fine with you not believing any of this - because you don't seem to. Your belief doesn't actually change my reality. I'm going to keep having fun cooperative gaming experiences with my group via PF1E or PF2E - whichever works better for us. And I'm going to continue to advocate for not turning the PF2E system into a GM straitjacket *because that won't be fun for me or my group*. I want tools, not restrictions. YMMV.
PS - I will note that some people love oppositional gameplay. They find the arms race thrilling and fun. They aren't playing it wrong, they are just not playing the way I do.
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<snipped a whole lot of stuff about how wrong I am> .I don't play "oppositionally." I play in PFS where the average GM doesn't want to kill PCs. I may play with a different GM every time I sit at the table. The GM and I may be completely unfamiliar with each other. How I want to fight, the information I want to use, is not going to be the same as the GM. There are at least three other players at the table, maybe five. It is totally unreasonable to expect the GM to consistently and reliably know what is going to be useful for every different player in every different context given every different build and multi-classed build. The only advantage of that clause is that the player can then point out, "Hey, X is not useful to me." To wit, Paizo got rid of the "useful" criteria and changed it to "best-known" which is totally under GM discretion and in no way requires anything useful.
It has noting to do with trust, it has to do with the fact that the GM and player are two different people and the GM is not a mind reader. The rules shouldn't require one. The rules shouldn't require the GM to consider every possible tactic the players can use and what might be valuable in any of those situations.
I want tools, not restrictions.A player knowledge check is not, nor should be a GM tool. It is a player tool. It represents an aspect of the PC and is a form of agency for the player, it should not be for the GM to decide what my PC knows. That should be decided by the rules. What a PC knows should be dictated by the rules, not the GM. There's no substantive advantage for GMs to be making that call and there is a whole lot of reasons the GM should not make that call.
Your response comes across as a GM who wants total agency over the game and doesn't want to give up any control over the players. You're trying to make this about "trust" and it has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with consistency and giving players the agency, not the GMs....
But you are not arguing that PFS play needs these restrictions... you are arguing that the entire game needs to be locked down to organized play level.
You want to say that PFS scenarios need those tables? I'm right there with you. I've run D&D as a convention judge before, and I value any tool that makes it easier to give players in an official campaign a consistent experience. If that tool also makes it easier for the GM to prepare and run the module, that's even better.
But I don't want or need to run my home game like I just met my players 27 seconds ago when they sat down at my table. PFS rules should be a subset of the main rules, they should not be the rules.
Edit to add: It is abundantly clear you really don't believe my games run the way I say they do. You seem to think I'm all into GM control. My players have more control over the stories than I do. I'm just there to set the stage.
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By my definition of gameplay, you play oppositionally. You don't trust your GM to play fair, and you want rules to constrain their ability to do that. If my players don't trust me to respect them enough to care about what they consider important and run the game in an evenhanded way, then they are with the wrong GM.
I've had the incredibly painful experience of having to ask a player to leave because they just could not accept that I wasn't secretly out to screw them over at some point. I tried for months to make it work, and the constant adversarial mistrust destroyed all my enjoyment in running games.
I've also played in games where the GM is on one team and the players are on another. I just don't do that anymore. It's not fun. If I have to have rules armor to shield me from expected GM malfeasance, I need to go play video games or something and not be at that table....
Two and a half years ago, I invited a newbie to my Iron Gods campaign. Still wet behind the ears a few months later, he wanted to optimize his character. I directed him to some good online guides to Pathfinder builds for his class.
Apparently, he binged on the Internet. He came back to the gaming table with lots of theories about how GMs screw over their characters. "If you step onto a drawbridge in heavy armor, the bridge will break and dump you in the moat to drown."
I was the only GM he ever played under and I had not done anything like that. I replied, "If your character is on a drawbridge, the guards might try to bull rush you into the moat. But a bridge that regularly handles heavy wagons is not going to break under a single man."
Really, to kill the party, I can simply say, "Rocks fall, everyone dies." The challenge is giving them heroic challenges without killing them and creating stories that I would love to tell over and over again. Which anyone reading my comments in these forums can see that I do tell, over and over again.
I don't play "oppositionally." I play in PFS where the average GM doesn't want to kill PCs. I may play with a different GM every time I sit at the table. The GM and I may be completely unfamiliar with each other. How I want to fight, the information I want to use, is not going to be the same as the GM. There are at least three other players at the table, maybe five. It is totally unreasonable to expect the GM to consistently and reliably know what is going to be useful for every different player in every different context given every different build and multi-classed build. The only advantage of that clause is that the player can then point out, "Hey, X is not useful to me." To wit, Paizo got rid of the "useful" criteria and changed it to "best-known" which is totally under GM discretion and in no way requires anything useful.
It has noting to do with trust, it has to do with the fact that the GM and player are two different people and the GM is not a mind reader. The rules shouldn't require one. The rules shouldn't require the GM to consider every possible tactic the players can use and what might be valuable in any of those situations.
I had considered running PFS games at The Family Game Store in Savage, Maryland. There is an active PFS chapter north of them. But I love customizing the modules around the characters too much to stick properly to a PFS scenario. As N N 959 said, I can't know what will fit every different player in every different context given every different build and multi-classed build. On the other hand, I can become an expert in four builds by four players who play those builds every week in my campaign.
A player knowledge check is not, nor should be a GM tool. It is a player tool. It represents an aspect of the player, it should not be for the GM to decide what my player knows. That should be decided by the rules. What a PC knows should be dictated by the rules, not the GM. There's no substantive advantage for GMs to be making that call and there is a whole lot of reasons the GM should not make that call.
Won't we need GM tools to help the GM decide which information is fair to give to a PC when the PC is mostly a stranger to the GM?
The PF2 backgrounds might serve as that tool. My wife's barbarian Haku Na Matata is a nomad with Mountain Lore. She would be happy if I phrased every piece of information through Mountain Lore. The ranger in the party is a scout, the wizard in the party is a scholar, and the alchemist in the party is a swamp nomad. Maybe the mountain nomad would learn a giant scorpion's mountain habitat, the swamp nomad would know about venoms and stings, the scout would know about its senses and stealth, and the scholar would know general information about predatory arachnids of the order Scorpiones.
Your response comes across as a GM who wants total agency over the game and doesn't want to give up any control over the players. You're trying to make this about "trust" and it has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with consistency and giving players the agency, not the GMs. Give me the information and I'll decide what of it is useful and how I want to use it. I don't need the GM to do that for me.
Even though I know what my players need, I still have to consider player agency. They need to make their own decisions. Thus, in PF1 after they roll successfully for I knowledge check but not enough to learn everything, I ask, "Do you want offense, defense, or special abilities?" That comes across much like Requielle's method of the PC asked a question during a Knowledge check.
Requielle does not sound controlling to me. She sounds like she would prefer control go to a person whom the players trust rather than to an abstract algorithm controlled by dice rolls or to the module writer.
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How about we agree to disagree, N N 959?
You obviously want more standardization and tables and such for knowledge checks, for reasons that seem clear and obvious and convincing to you.
I always found the PF1E DCX+5 rule to be really workable for reasons that are clear and obvious and convincing to me. I really don't want a table outlining that I must tell my players about the monster's cold vulnerability at X+5, and can't mention its spell-like abilities until X+15 as the base rules.
On the other hand, let me toss out there (not for the first time) that if PF2E adventures are going to use the 4 degrees of success rule for knowledge checks, *they need that bad info people get on critical failures included in the same tables as the good info they get on success*. Holy crap, expecting any kind of consistency when you are relying on the GM to make up misleading info on the fly is just going to fail horribly.
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EDIT: Let me point out that the obvious reason why 3.5/PF used the K. Check rules they do is because the original designers did not want the players to have a lot of information. So the rules use the GM as a gatekeeper: we want the k. check to help, but we really want to keep the players in the dark as much as possible. That decision is an artistic one. If players/GMs like that experience, there is no arguing against it.
This is a good point. Back when I played AD&D and D&D 3.0 I heard from other players and from an occassional article when I purchased Dragon magazine about players abusing metagame knowledge, who memorized the Bestiary and used player knowledge that the PC lacked to exploit the weaknesses of the monster. Yet when I became a Pathfinder GM and began regularly reading the Paizo forums, I did not see complaints about that. The problem had disappeared.
Maybe Pathfinder's design prevents that with a good Knowledge system. Or maybe the Pathfinder monsters have better designs that leave them less vulnerable.
Won't we need GM tools to help the GM decide which information is fair to give to a PC when the PC is mostly a stranger to the GM? ***My wife's barbarian Haku Na Matata is a nomad with Mountain Lore. She would be happy if I phrased every piece of information through Mountain Lore. The ranger in the party is a scout, the wizard in the party is a scholar, and the alchemist in the party is a swamp nomad.If Paizo wanted to add granularity based on each individual PC...great. But that isn't making the game simpler, it's making it more complex. I think it's asking too much for Paizo to customize this on this level. The fact that you might be able to do this on the fly probably puts you in the Mozart's of GMs.
I apologize, but I don't think the system should be optimized for someone with such rare talents as yourself. I think it should consider the burden on the average GM and how little meat there is at this juncture of the game. It's a K check at the start of the battle. Any player might make four or five of these a game. It should be quick, simple, and straight forward. Randomizing the output doesn't really improve the game, it just makes players feel like they are wasting time and energy investing in this facet of the game. Is that really what Paizo wants?
I don't think of my GMing abilities as rare. Three of my five regular players could manage it.
In another thread in early August, we discussed how to decide which of the 4 knowledges, Arcane, Nature, Occultism, and Religon, should be rolled for a particular creature. I cataloged the creatures and demontrated that one of its traits was always a classic creature type (well, Magical Beast was shortened to Beast, and a few other changes, but it was close) that could be mapped to the original Knowledge types that could be mapped to the new knowledge skills. However, the consensus of the thread is for the real bestiary, Paizo should write the knowledge skill on the creature stat block. And add the DC, too.
This seems a good solution to avoiding giving the burden of deciding "best known" to the GM. Write it on the creature block.
Giant Scorpion could have:
Knowledge Nature DC 15. First known Melee stinger attack. Second known Scorpion Sting reaction and Giant Scorpion Venom.
Sewer Ooze could have:
Knowledge Nature DC 15. First known AC, TAC, and Immunities. Second known Perception and Filth Wave.
[I tracked oozes to Occultism, but most people thought oozes should be Nature.]
Sinspawn could have:
Knowledge Occultism DC 16. First known Language and Attack of Opportunity. Second known Sin Scent and its subtype details under Customizing Sinspawn.
Thus, if someone rolls a 15 or higher on a Nature Recall Knowledge check for a giant scorpion, they learn "Melee stinger +7 (reach 10 feet), Damage 1d12+4 plus giant scorpion venom," but not the details of the venom. If someone rolls a 15 or higher on a Nature Recall Knowledge check for a sewer ooze, they learn AC 5, TAC 5, and immune to acid, asleep, critical hits, mental, precision, and visual.
Thus, in PF1 after they roll successfully for I knowledge check but not enough to learn everything, I ask, "Do you want offense, defense, or special abilities?" That comes across much like Requielle's method of the PC asked a question during a Knowledge check.Are you giving ALL the offenses or just deciding which of several you are going to share? Because if it's the latter, then you're making the decision on what the player gets to know.
I give the entire Offense block, Defense block, or Special Abilities block, plus anything from the Statistics block that relates, such as combat feats. Half measures are no fun for either GM or players.
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As a DM, a PC successfully makes a Recall Knowledge check on an enemy, Im gonna give that PC useful info. If he critically succeeds, he will get alot of useful info.
As I've pointed out several times in this thread, that is absolutely NOT what the rules say.
The rules say ONE piece of information on a success, TWO on a crit. Rerolls allowed but at an escalating DC. One failure and you stop.
That is NOT me screwing with the players. That is doing what the rules SAY.
Oh, and its NOT clear to me as a GM what information the players actually want. Players and characters want DIFFERENT things. I don't necessarily know what is best to tell them. Although I'm pretty sure that telling them the Manticore has spikes is NOT it :-(. And, as written, it is the GM who decides and not the player.
In fact, I admit that I am violating those rules. Because the rules are atrocious. I am in violent agreement with you as to what SHOULD happen.
But saying "Well, a good GM should just ignore the rules" which is what you ARE saying whether you realize it or not is a pretty good indicator that the rules are seriously flawed, NOT that they're working
I'll also reiterate that I expect Paizo to fix this in the final product. I don't see this as some fatal flaw in PF2, I see it as a wart to be fixed.
Edit: Just read some of the other comments. Note that I'm not really talking about who determines what information to give. That is, in my mind, a fairly minor matter (groups will come up with a solution that works for them). My main issues are (as I stated way up there) that, mechanically, the PF2 rules are just WAY WORSE:
1) No take 10 or take 20 (Assurance is literally LESS than useless since it is almost always an auto fail which stops you getting more answers)
2) Get incorrect information on a crit fail
3) Unclear what skill to use
4) Get ONE piece of information on a success, TWO on a crit. No More
5) Takes an action
6) Player characters, by design, can NOT get the bonuses that they could in PF1 so will only rarely get more than 1 or 2 pieces of information (they stop rolling on a failure). It will be very common to get NO information at all with a slightly less than fully maximized skill. Dabbling in knowledges is insanely bad since it means you're close to being wrong as often as right.
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Really? I always go for 20 Str when I'm going for a big beefy character, and it's usually worked out quite well for me. That's besides the point though, as is buffing the monsters.
The 7 points can almost always be better spent elsewhere, IME. Increased Saves and even skills are more useful than +1to hit and +1 or +2 damage. But fair enough.
The point is that in PF1e a PC character can reach the same level of physical prowess as a fairly beefy monster. Of course that's not true in all cases, as there's monsters with stats way above and beyond what a character can reasonably reach without going into one of the aforementioned super optimized builds, but a Barbarian striding into battle with legendarily high strength and endurance is well within the realm of possibility.
A 10th level character in PF1 can have a +5 Str Mod, and a 13th level one focusing can have a +6. +7 being just beyond that is fairly reasonable.
Now in PF2e that's actually impossible, because stat boosts are just gone. I get why, having to keep track of damage, attack, skill, and carrying capacity changes when your strength goes up and down is something that could probably stand to be streamlined. Instead though all those effects get split up between various effects and abilities, so for example damage increases come from Rage, Badger Rage, Enlarge, and... I think nothing else?
There's probably something else somewhere. But such bonuses are fairly rare, it's true.
Then if you want to get the attack improvements you need to go to other stuff, and then for the skills and carrying capacity you have to go for even more stuff, and etc.
Having a to-hit on par with a Treachery Demon isn't hard. Just being a 13th level Fighter with a Str-item does it (13 level + 3 Proficiency + 6 Ability + 3 Weapon = +25), and lots of people can get there with buffs (about +20 to +21 of that is just being a 13th level character who uses weapons).
So in PF2e it's possible to have the equivalent of 30 strength, but it's way more work to do. You can consider it an optics thing since I think it might still be doable at that level.
My point was actually that they reduced the Treachery Demon to +7 Str (Str 24) from Str 30, in compensation for PCs getting lower Ability scores, and that such a reduction was probably within a point of the right amount.
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The fact that you might be able to do this on the fly probably puts you in the Mozarts of GMs.
It may be uncommon but it's not rare. I've had a few GMs with this style and it's improvising rather than randomizing. Some systems - like Fate Core - actually focus on this as the GM's primary role. It's something that I did heavily back when I ran games play by post but thought I could never manage in tabletop due to time constraints - I was surprised to find that it started to come easily after a short number of sessions. Mathmuse may be exceptional but it's not in this area.
This is a good point. Back when I played AD&D and D&D 3.0 I heard from other players and from an occassional article when I purchased Dragon magazine about players abusing metagame knowledge, who memorized the Bestiary and used player knowledge that the PC lacked to exploit the weaknesses of the monster. Yet when I became a Pathfinder GM and began regularly reading the Paizo forums, I did not see complaints about that. The problem had disappeared.
At least for me, it's not that the problem disappeared... It's that Pandora's box was opened and we moved on. We're already down the rabbit hole. That wasn't a abusive scheme on the part of the players - it was a natural side effect of system mastery and the System Reference Documents appearing on the internet. I don't normally run published adventures - Doomsday Dawn is only getting my attention because of the playtest - but in my own campaigns I almost always vary the encounters from the default. Either by terrain, scenario, or by adapting the creatures.
The players may know the stats of a Red Dragon - because they've been playing for decades or because they happened to look them up - but fighting one on a flying carpet while trying to save an airship is going to run very differently. Especially if this Red Dragon is missing it's right eye. Some players are better at staying in character than others but knowing the system inside out means that some metagaming is going to happen. Victory conditions that aren't "kill it" and defeat conditions that aren't "die" really move groups (or at least my groups) beyond this to focus on the scenario at hand.
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Yeah I improv most of my games as well.
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"they try to propose us a more "Dark Souls" game"
Except in Drak Souls you win if you're actually good, while in PF2 it's down to randomness and player ability is minimized both before combat (optimization is no longer possible) and in combat (tactics are weak and unlikely to work, positioning is less relevant, CC is ineffective etc)
It's actually the opposite of a game like Dark Souls that rewards you for good play
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"they try to propose us a more "Dark Souls" game"
Except in Drak Souls you win if you're actually good, while in PF2 it's down to randomness and player ability is minimized both before combat (optimization is no longer possible) and in combat (tactics are weak and unlikely to work, positioning is less relevant, CC is ineffective etc)
It's actually the opposite of a game like Dark Souls that rewards you for good play
I'd disagree very strongly with that point about combat strategy not mattering, in PF1, I could optimise enough that I'd hit almost regardless of dice roll and could alpha down almost any problem I encounter in a turn or 2, positioning for a flank or someone spending a turn to give people a +1 to hit bonus usually wasn't worth it.
In PF2 due to such strongly bounded accuracy most of the abilities that give +X to hit are very valuable. Against equivalent level foes, +1 to hit is 5% more hits and 5% more crits on your first attack, making your opponent flat footed is 10% to both. Higher hp pools and better in combat healing on the PC side, mean fights are longer, which mean spending time adjusting the odds in your favour matter more, you're more likely to roll an attack 10-20 times than you are to make 2-5 attacks so percentage adjustments start to really become significant. I've noticed DOTs (Damage over time) effects like acid or bleeding are actually really significant tools in equivalent level fights, whereas in PF1 they were an insignificance.
It's a very different metagame in PF2, people who learned the "correct" way to play in PF1 could well be experiencing shock at the lower hit rate and large health pools of the bad guys, but its worth trying to modify your play a bit and see if the experience changes itself for you.
I definitely feel their are issues with the new system, but the core chassis feels solid and the updates have all been very positive.
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It is interesting how the debates always migrate.
The OP made very valid concerns about things feeling mathematically the same, even when coming from very different starting points.
The "4e feel" and antithesis of the 1E feel were noted.
These are serious and real issues which are fundamental to the mechanical chassis of the system. And, steadily, more and more people are running into it.
And, by its very nature, the homogeneity is something that becomes more and more apparent the more you experience the game. So people who are little bothered by it now will be greatly bothered by it later and some people who don't see it at all now will be bothered by it later.
There will be people who love it "as is" and will never stop. But there will not be enough.
None of this debate over why each individual loves their own approach does anything to make the OP a 2E player.
As it stands the system has a fatal flaw and I'll never be a 2E player either.
This is a playtest. There is a great opportunity to hear the feedback and make changes.
Sunk cost fallacies and egos aside, the long run is what counts.
How do you stop the steady stream of people walking away?
That is a more important questions than "how do I tweak the game all those other people are walking away from?".
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The OP made very valid concerns about things feeling mathematically the same, even when coming from very different starting points.
The "4e feel" and antithesis of the 1E feel were noted.
If you are feeling that then I believe it's simply because you are building every similar characters. I can't argue with mathematical point, mostly because PF2 makes math matter in a way that PF1 doesn't (if you want to hit on your first attack in PF1, you will), but the characters aren't homogeneous if you don't build them that way.
To me The Affair at Sombrefell Hall showed how much range there is to build characters. Our party was two Clerics, a Paladin and a Bard, and they all felt and played very differently. The Gorumite Cleric multi-classed into Fighter and took the Attack of Opportunity Feat, and waded into combat to smashed the heck out of stuff with his Greatsword. The other Cleric served Nethys and multi-classed into Sorcerer and function very much as the party's blaster, throwing out damage spells and heals from the back. The Paladin zipped around the place on his Wolf, able to stand next to the Gorumite one turn and chase distant enemies the next. The Bard was a buffing machine, shooting arrows into foes between songs.
It was a genuine surprise that no two of the characters felt the same as each other, even when there was significant crossover in role/class between. And the combats definitely felt more like PF1 than 4e, though the increased ability to move about or cast spells in combat was noted as a nice change from PF1.
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If you are feeling that then I believe it's simply because you are building every similar characters. I can't argue with mathematical point, mostly because PF2 makes math matter in a way that PF1 doesn't (if you want to hit on your first attack in PF1, you will), but the characters aren't homogeneous if you don't build them that way.
Thats simply not true. And, ultimately, the math point, which you concede, is a very important thing.
To me The Affair at Sombrefell Hall showed how much range there is to build characters. Our party was two Clerics, a Paladin and a Bard, and they all felt and played very differently. The Gorumite Cleric multi-classed into Fighter and took the Attack of Opportunity Feat, and waded into combat to smashed the heck out of stuff with his Greatsword. The other Cleric served Nethys and multi-classed into Sorcerer and function very much as the party's blaster, throwing out damage spells and heals from the back. The Paladin zipped around the place on his Wolf, able to stand next to the Gorumite one turn and chase distant enemies the next. The Bard was a buffing machine, shooting arrows into foes between songs.
It was a genuine surprise that no two of the characters felt the same as each other, even when there was significant crossover in role/class between. And the combats definitely felt more like PF1 than 4e, though the increased ability to move about or cast spells in combat was noted as a nice change from PF1.
You can paint different narratives on top of the same math. Nobody is disputing that. And there are some differences.
There are a lot less differences and it is completely reasonable to find games with more differences better.
Clearly a lot of people have this concern.
So, again, the question is how do you get people to stop walking away?
There are numerous 4E fans that assured me over and over how much they personally loved 4E. Just not nearly enough. They didn't solve the problem. Will you?
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Here’s were we need to highlight the difference between assumption and fact. We do not know how many people are walking away. We do know that many people who first had reservations about the system, still have those reservations, and unhappy people tend to make more noise than those who are happy. If your assumptions are correct, the game will radically change before it goes to print. You and I may consider ourselves authorities, being old enough to remember 4e or even D&D 2e, but relative to the people navigating his venture, we have very little skin in the game. It’s our hobby; it’s their careers and they’ve got people who were actually on the inside of the 4e fiasco. Controlling the narrative by circulating what has now become a tired trope on these boards does not make it neccesarily true. The proof will be in the pudding, not in feelings, angry board postings, or analogous anecdotes.
As an authority old enough to recall 4E, I'm sure you also recall that they also assured us that voices on the internet were not reflective of the community as a whole.
It turned out that a lot of unhappy people were not even bothering to comment.We were also assured that us armchair experts should be confident that the professionals behind the design know better and would never make an error like this.
We don't know numbers. But it is not an assumption that the *tone* and patterns of debate are exactly repeating what we saw before.
A few people saying something doesn't make it true. I don't dispute that. Of course, that cuts both ways.
But the patterns are strongly consistent.
Let me asking you bluntly: Are SOME people walking away? Do you have any evidence that it is NOT a significant portion? Do you have ANY answer for how to salvage them?
Calling something a "tired trope" doesn't make it an accurate evaluation. And the steady trend, online and offline, in this assessment is alarming, while the presence of "you don't know" as a substitute for equally matter of fact counter-assessments of the conditions is further telling.
The next stage of 4E was "they didn't give it a fair chance". People begged for change, were told their opinions were trivial and irrelevant, and then those same people were blamed for not supporting the product. Are you going to hand-wave us now and blame us later?
Show me your evidence. Show me your trends. Show me your historic precedent.
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... The proof will be in the pudding, not in feelings, angry board postings, or analogous anecdotes.
Wouldn't everyone involved like to avoid bad pudding?
If all we are supposed to do is wait quietly at the table until someone serves the pudding, *why have a playtest at all*? If the community narrative is meaningless, why solicit it?
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I'm not sure if there's an exact technical definition for "edition war", but somehow I feel like it's this vague tabboo that only gets brought up as a prejorative when it suits a poster's agenda. This is not a knock on any individual person, or a knock on either side (Pro or anti 2E).
I mean I've yet to see anyone here who says "I like X edition, you like Y and are therefore stupid". And intelligent comparisons between editions are somewhat inevitable, if not vital to a discussion about, you know, a new edition.
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Regarding Knowledge:
Both my current GM as well as I-as-GM would love some actual guidelines regarding what counts as "a bit of information".
In our current PF1 campaign, he tends to just send us a link to the monster listing (though obviously, the monster we're actually fighting might have some changes) after we identified it, at least if it's an Undead or Externar, since we tend to crush those knowledge rolls and he doesn't want to have to figure out what 4+ pieces of information are supposed to be.
He's not really happy with that, and while I don't mind getting stat blocks, I'm not happy that he's not happy.
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If you are feeling that then I believe it's simply because you are building every similar characters. I can't argue with mathematical point, mostly because PF2 makes math matter in a way that PF1 doesn't (if you want to hit on your first attack in PF1, you will), but the characters aren't homogeneous if you don't build them that way.Thats simply not true. And, ultimately, the math point, which you concede, is a very important thing.
Important how? Mathematically builds are similar because the range between good and bad is lower. It's not a negative that one party member isn't 20 points behind another in Stealth by level 6. It's not bad that there's now a reason for a Wizard to actually use a sword if they want to be Gandalf, instead of being half their level behind a Fighter.
A 4 or 5 point gap between an expert and a novice is fine because it allows the novice to at least try when it matters. To me that's a massive positive of the system, not a negative. There are definitely some parts of the system where the numbers need to be tweaked, but those are minor compared to get the core of the engine right.
Let me asking you bluntly: Are SOME people walking away? Do you have any evidence that it is NOT a significant portion? Do you have ANY answer for how to salvage them?
That's not how it works. When someone claims a significant portion are giving up, they're the one that needs to provide evidence. If 99.9% of people who played the game loved it we'd still see posts saying people were quitting, because that is the nature of the beast.
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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Assumptions stated as fact without evidence are still anecdotes, nonetheless. They become tired tropes when one insists continually they are undeniably reflective of truth.Here’s were we need to highlight the difference between assumption and fact. We do not know how many people are walking away. We do know that many people who first had reservations about the system, still have those reservations, and unhappy people tend to make more noise than those who are happy. If your assumptions are correct, the game will radically change before it goes to print. You and I may consider ourselves authorities, being old enough to remember 4e or even D&D 2e, but relative to the people navigating his venture, we have very little skin in the game. It’s our hobby; it’s their careers and they’ve got people who were actually on the inside of the 4e fiasco. Controlling the narrative by circulating what has now become a tired trope on these boards does not make it neccesarily true. The proof will be in the pudding, not in feelings, angry board postings, or analogous anecdotes.As an authority old enough to recall 4E, I'm sure you also recall that they also assured us that voices on the internet were not reflective of the community as a whole.
It turned out that a lot of unhappy people were not even bothering to comment.We were also assured that us armchair experts should be confident that the professionals behind the design know better and would never make an error like this.
We don't know numbers. But it is not an assumption that the *tone* and patterns of debate are exactly repeating what we saw before.
A few people saying something doesn't make it true. I don't dispute that. Of course, that cuts both ways.
But the patterns are strongly consistent.
Let me asking you bluntly: Are SOME people walking away? Do you have any evidence that it is NOT a significant portion? Do you have ANY answer for how to salvage them?
Calling something a "tired trope" doesn't make it an accurate evaluation. And the steady trend, online and offline, in this assessment is alarming, while the presence of "you don't know" as a substitute for equally matter of...
I'll repost what I did in another thread about the value of anecdotes and why you shouldn't ignore them.
Jeff Bezos regularly uses anecdotes to dig into problems at Amazon, and regularly speaks about this in interviews, and internally at the company.
"I am actually a big fan of anecdotes in business," says Bezos.
"It's very interesting because we have tons of metrics. We have weekly business reviews with these metric decks," he says. "We know so many things about customers and whether we are delivering on time, whether the packages have too much air in them and [are] wasteful of packaging and so we have so many metrics that we monitor."
But, "the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There is something wrong with the way that you are measuring it," says Bezos.
"You do need the data, but then you need to check that data with your intuition and your instincts. And you need to teach that to all the senior executives and junior executives, too"
I'd say this as equally applies to game designers as it does to business executives. This isn't to say that every anecdote is going to be right, since there's clearly examples of multiple sides of any different issue, but to dismiss the ones out of hand which disagree with survey data because they're "not data" is throwing out valuable information about something not being represented in the data.
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It's not bad that there's now a reason for a Wizard to actually use a sword if they want to be Gandalf
Which is great if you like Gandalf wizards. Not being sarcastic, that's perfect if that is the campaign world you want to create and the stories you want to tell.
I guess that's where it's breaking down for me. I don't mind an occasional Gandalf mucking about. But I don't want a campaign world full of them. I need space for the Raistlins, too.
And as I keep saying, YMMV.
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Let me asking you bluntly: Are SOME people walking away? Do you have any evidence that it is NOT a significant portion?
The "What pace are you keeping?" thread has 27 groups described in it and exactly one poster mentioning that they might drop out because it's not fun.
That's, what, a little under 4%?
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Well, then you run into a problem that either you have a wizard who by default is competent with a sword and you can have Gandalf but not Raistlin; or you have a Wizard who should avoid melee at all costs and you can make Raistlin but not Gandalf. It's one or the other, unless you make classes much less meaningful.
Well right now we have a system where a wizard isn't by default competant with a sword, but can be with a single Feat. So that seems like the problem you are concerned with has already been solved- if you want Raistlin, don't specc for melee, and if you want Gandalf then do.
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Let me asking you bluntly: Are SOME people walking away? Do you have any evidence that it is NOT a significant portion?The "What pace are you keeping?" thread has 27 groups described in it and exactly one poster mentioning that they might drop out because it's not fun.
That's, what, a little under 4%?
And that 96% is most likely 4% of the people actually trying the system....
The ones posting are the ones dedicated to making THIS system work, not the ones that think that THIS system will end in broken glass, tears, and spilled scotch.
Most people dropping out of the playtest AREN'T posting.
Wait... are you suggesting that treating a tiny, statistically non-representative sample of self-selected posters on an internet forum as though they weren't basically meaningless against the overall playtest is a bad idea?
Hunh. What a concept.
I'm going to be self-indulgent enough to quote my own post from another thread now.
Most playersCan we please stop talking about "most players" in these threads? Not a single one of us has any idea about what "most players" think about anything in this playtest. The only people who have anything close to that data are working for Paizo, and they are both a) keeping the data fairly close to their chests and b) still are working with a self-selected and therefore biased sample.
The rest of us are substituting anecdotes for data and perceptual biases for objective observation.
We'll get a lot more done more constructively if we stick to what we ourselves think and/or have experienced.