Not what I thought it would be

[Tank McDoomulus]

So our group stopped mid campaign to take up this play test.
After first I didn't have much interest, but decided to give it a try thinking maybe input from players would have overall impact on the finished product. What I am finding is a convoluted system and a play test besieged with rule changes.
Look, I get that people will have complaints about the play test, but to be told that they made rules changes to the play test??? Were is the consistency across the board?
Some big things I have noticed thus far that is just turning me off completely.

1.) How is a Gnoll using a non magical short bow doing 2d6 of damage, while my ranger using a non magical short bow only doing d6? Is that a typo or is the deck stacked in the monsters favor? And speaking of ranger, why is his first ranger bow feat for a crossbow? Why am I being forced to wait for a ranger feat like Favored Aim and instead getting a feat for reloading a crossbow??? Nonsense.

2.) Why on earth do I need to spend resonance points and a charge from a wand to use said wand? And why are wands so limited with just 10 charges?? Makes purchasing or selecting them for a character almost meaningless.

3.) When did cantrips become so powerful and why is magic missile so powerful?? You use vebral, somatic and material and you get 3 missiles at 4th level??? Nonsense.

I could go on and on but a lot of people have already covered the complaints I have.

The upside so far is I do like the ability build with ancestry, class, and background. Kind of gives you a balance of abilities without breaking the bank.
I do like how proficiencies are done, but there doesn't seem to be a way to increase your armor proficiency or weapon proficiency. Unless I really missed something.

But in the overall scheme it seems like from what I have experienced so far is there is a very favorable approach to the monsters in the at test.
I get this is a play test and I am not investing in the characters long term, but I would like to enjoy the game regardless.

[DerNils]

As to the Monster damage, Monsters don't work like characters anymore. They have bonuses built in that Characters are supposed to get from items.

[Turelus]

Tank McDoomulus wrote:

3.) When did cantrips become so powerful and why is magic missile so powerful?? You use vebral, somatic and material and you get 3 missiles at 4th level??? Nonsense.

I'd imagine because playing Evocation in PF1 was boring.

I'm running a PF1 campaign right now with a player who wanted to play a wizard specialised in Evocation spells to see "if it's really that bad" we're now at mid levels (13th) and he feels useless in most combat scenarios.

Sure he can get a big damage spell off for 40-80 damage (maybe AoE) but when the Paladin and Slayer are doing 100-200 per round it makes his spells seem meaningless. He's already agreed he would have been more use being a CC or buff bases wizard again.

I think buffing Evocation spells to actually do damage is one of the things Paizo got very right with the Playtest. Wizards should be allowed to throw out a spell and not feel like they only tickled an enemy.

[Freagarthach]

Turelus wrote:

Tank McDoomulus wrote:

3.) When did cantrips become so powerful and why is magic missile so powerful?? You use vebral, somatic and material and you get 3 missiles at 4th level??? Nonsense.

I'd imagine because playing Evocation in PF1 was boring.

I'm running a PF1 campaign right now with a player who wanted to play a wizard specialised in Evocation spells to see "if it's really that bad" we're now at mid levels (13th) and he feels useless in most combat scenarios.

Sure he can get a big damage spell off for 40-80 damage (maybe AoE) but when the Paladin and Slayer are doing 100-200 per round it makes his spells seem meaningless. He's already agreed he would have been more use being a CC or buff bases wizard again.

I think buffing Evocation spells to actually do damage is one of the things Paizo got very right with the Playtest. Wizards should be allowed to throw out a spell and not feel like they only tickled an enemy.

The only way for Evocation to keep up with binary "target neutralized" Transmutation spells like Baleful Polymorph and Flesh to Stone, in which the caster raises the DCs to win, is to become Holy Word, where you raise your CL for the binary win. "Doing part of the job" is always going to seem weaker than "I win" in the long view.

That dichotomy, between binary encounter ending and "some damage," is part of the tricky balance the Devs are working to find with the playtest.

[Dragonriderje]

Try to remember that this is an entirely different game. Other than being d20 based, this playtest operates almost completely differently. Almost all numbers are calculated using different formulas than PF1e. Things have changed! Make no assumptions about balance or game mechanics based on your knowledge of PF1e because there are many things that are simply not the case anymore.

As for the rules updates, I agree that it is a bit of pain to be given a playtest rulebook, and then a 10-page document of edits. But I'm hoping they are doing this because they are receiving so much feedback that they're getting what they want from the playtest fast enough that they want to change things to test new versions. Still annoying, but if they really want to playtest a new game, publish it, and release it for next GenCon, this is the pace they need I suppose.

As to your point about things favoring monsters: There is a bit of a joke in my games. One of my players started saying "Get [censored], PCs" specifically after we looked up the rules for initiative ties and the joke has kind of continued ever since.

[ENHenry]

Tank McDoomulus wrote:

What I am finding is a convoluted system and a play test besieged with rule changes.

Look, I get that people will have complaints about the play test, but to be told that they made rules changes to the play test??? Were is the consistency across the board?

Change is inherent to a playtest - the ruleset for the D&D5 playtest changed something like 10 times over a two year time span - major revisions, where whole classes didn't even work the same way, totally different sets of class features, etc.

Also inherent in any playtest is focus on function over aesthetics - in a video game, it would be banging into every wall in existance to check for collision bugs, triggering, finishing, and resetting a quest multiple times to ensure that minor changes like owning a certain random item did not make the quest fail or crash the game.

Same thing with this playtest - this is far bigger than a minor point revision (say, like D&D 3.0 to D&D 3.5) and more like the changes when D&D 2 when to D&D 3.0, except that was a closed test of only a few hundred people where the public did not get to see the sausage being made. This playtest is a rules system abattoir for all the world to see, but not in any way different from any other playtest that is a full functioning playtest, and not just for show for the general public the way a AAA video game company would do for a public beta.