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Nobody in my region has the time to keep up with all the updates. That is why we have abandoned the playtest. No gm feels confident enough in his knowledge to run it. I think we need to put on the brakes and give folks a chance to catch up. Right now it feels like a runaway train that we bought a ticket for (the original playtest document) that is now taking us to an unknown station. I feel overwhelmed by the bi-weekly changes, and its making me doubt the quality of the end product. Does anyone else feel this way? I love Pathfinder and PFS dearly, but i am despairing for its future!
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Its a weird balance. There was a thread not long ago that said the changes were coming to slow. I'm more on the to fast side myself to keep up but as long as it is working for paizo I'm fine with it. Its really about them getting the info they need more then anything else.
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That’s ok, update 1.6 coming this Monday is supposed to be the last of the biweekly updates. Maybe you’ll be able to catch up then.
Nobody in my region has the time to keep up with all the updates. That is why we have abandoned the playtest. No gm feels confident enough in his knowledge to run it. I think we need to put on the brakes and give folks a chance to catch up. Right now it feels like a runaway train that we bought a ticket for (the original playtest document) that is now taking us to an unknown station. I feel overwhelmed by the bi-weekly changes, and its making me doubt the quality of the end product. Does anyone else feel this way? I love Pathfinder and PFS dearly, but i am despairing for its future!
Good news for you: Update 1.6 is the last big one.
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You will have a bit less than 2 months to give feedback after Update 1.6 arrives on Monday though
Play Shrieking Peak and parts 4, 5 and 7 of Doomsday Dawn. Playtest lite.
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The playtest schedule has been too fast paced for us...we ended up skipping sessions to keep momentum. I do wish that they had allocated more time to each section.
But we haven't had a problem keeping up with the Updates. A new one laying every two weeks has been fine.
Its good to know that 1.6 will be the last one for some time. I hope now we can get our brains around it all now and give it another shot. Thanks!
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One thing that I have found really helpful is that a couple of awesome fans, Caio Henrique Di Giaimo and Gustavo Malek, have been annotating the Rulebook PDF with the updates as they come out. Here's the link.
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I'm unsure if it's gone too fast. From what I can tell, the Playtest's math is broken, and the designers recognise this.
That does make sense. It might explain why there's been so much focus on new mechanics and character options instead of fundamental gameplay elements. If so, that's a bit of a relief as I've been concerned that class, ancestry, and resonance have been discussed to death but there's been barely a mention on Exploration Mode in the playtest.
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I'm unsure if it's gone too fast. From what I can tell, the Playtest's math is broken, and the designers recognise this.
And when the underlying math of the system needs redoing, it'll change everything else. So what can be gleaned from the rest of the playtesting is probably very little.
This is only about half true, IMO.
The math is broken, and they are aware of it, and it is effecting what rules elements they change in the playtest. As Once and Future Kai notes, they are thus focusing on options rather than fundamental gameplay.
But saying that playtesting is thus useless is untrue. The playtest has established, and established pretty definitively, a variety of things about the player base's preferences from the fact that people want more powerful spells, to several options (ala Bard Muses) being a very popular idea for just about every Class, to Resonance being generally despised, to Trinkets being well liked conceptually even if people think they're kinda weak.
And all of that is good information to possess and makes the playtest very useful indeed.
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Math issues that Paizo has been able to analyze and modify because we did the Playtest.
I pretty much agree with DeadManWalking on all this. Because of the Playtest we were able to give Paizo direct outside feedback into Pathfinder 2e. We spotted things that they had overlooked after working on it for so long. The numbers issue was identified quickly but as they have said it would have required an effective rewrite of the whole bestiary to fix it.
Paizo instead took the opportunity to explore other issues or things they wanted to see our reaction to. Resonance got shifted to the Focus playtest, which I think is a great step in the right direction, new options for classes are coming out soon as well as some we already got. Some spells got a damage buff, multiclassing came out, and other things all got brought more in line with what the finished goal is for 2e.
Now after all this, Paizo can look at the adjustments they plan on making to monsters and can go, oh this is going to be too little of an adjustment or too much just based on how the current power level of PCs handles the overtuned monsters. Which is all fantastic in the long run.
While I would love to see a few more hey we did a bit of modifying run this one-shot with these pre-gens after December, I can definitely say that this Playtest has been a huge boon for Paizo and for Pathfinder 2e
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The thing is, Paizo went into the playtest with a set of rules which already heavily indicated the direction they wanted to take the game into. Broken math and so on can be corrected, but I fundamentally disagree with some of the underlying motivations which seemed to drive the first set of rules which were released to the public, i.e. super-tight math paradigm from levels 1-20 and spellcasters being nerfed into the ground. As well as some of the class design decisions, like removing Smite Evil from Paladins.
Of course I'm just one guy with a loud mouth, but for me, personally, I am still not too hopeful that the final released product will be something I'll be interested in playing. I'll be getting the PDF for 10 bucks, for sure. But unless the ruleset in that electronic file convinces me thoroughly, I see little hope that I'll change to 2E.
Nobody in my region has the time to keep up with all the updates. That is why we have abandoned the playtest. No gm feels confident enough in his knowledge to run it. I think we need to put on the brakes and give folks a chance to catch up. Right now it feels like a runaway train that we bought a ticket for (the original playtest document) that is now taking us to an unknown station. I feel overwhelmed by the bi-weekly changes, and its making me doubt the quality of the end product. Does anyone else feel this way? I love Pathfinder and PFS dearly, but i am despairing for its future!
Testing is a job in a way.
public testing unpayed, but you are getting payed by playing the game for free.
And they count on players that can manage more than one session per week, not one per two weeks, maybe.
Their inside testers, I'm sure play one session per day.
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I would argue that 'more powerful spells', 'trinket powerlevel' and even 'item usage limits (resonance)' are all math-related issues.
Not exactly. They're conceptual issues with effects on the math. And none have actually been changed too much in the playtest...but knowing they were issues at all means that they will very likely be changed for the final version of the game.
The thing is, Paizo went into the playtest with a set of rules which already heavily indicated the direction they wanted to take the game into. Broken math and so on can be corrected, but I fundamentally disagree with some of the underlying motivations which seemed to drive the first set of rules which were released to the public, i.e. super-tight math paradigm from levels 1-20 and spellcasters being nerfed into the ground. As well as some of the class design decisions, like removing Smite Evil from Paladins.
They've explicitly said they're gonna power up spells due to general dissatisfaction with their current low power level, and we're getting some pretty major Paladin changes tomorrow (whether this will include anything like Smite Evil I'm not sure).
Really, I'm just not sure at all that these things (tight math aside, anyway) are nearly as set in stone as you seem to think they are.
Of course I'm just one guy with a loud mouth, but for me, personally, I am still not too hopeful that the final released product will be something I'll be interested in playing. I'll be getting the PDF for 10 bucks, for sure. But unless the ruleset in that electronic file convinces me thoroughly, I see little hope that I'll change to 2E.
That's certainly your prerogative, but I'm much more optimistic based on the changes we've already seen and particularly due to the acknowledgements of several ongoing issues.
I have shared some of my points of exasperation here.
Stopping playtesting because your style of game is so impacted by the math issues is entirely reasonable, but I'd like to say for the record that I think Paizo not changing the math during the playtest is also a pretty reasonable choice.
The math issues are absolutely essential to the final game, but they're also by far the easiest issues for Paizo to fix in a 'white room' environment without additional playtesting. They are math, susceptible to analysis as such, and the folks at Paizo already know the direction we want things adjusted, and even the degree to some extent. It's not like we've been quiet on the issue in question, I mean I know I haven't.
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Really, I'm just not sure at all that these things (tight math aside, anyway) are nearly as set in stone as you seem to think they are.
At this point, where I've personally stopped participating in the playtest, for me it's about how optimistic I am about the general direction. Again, I can totally still be wrong. But from what I've seen, the indicators point in a different direction than they do for you.
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Really, I'm just not sure at all that these things (tight math aside, anyway) are nearly as set in stone as you seem to think they are.At this point, where I've personally stopped participating in the playtest, for me it's about how optimistic I am about the general direction. Again, I can totally still be wrong. But from what I've seen, the indicators point in a different direction than they do for you.
I'm not necessarily arguing the final game will be to your liking, I'm just saying that evidence suggests that Paizo is willing to change things and, indeed, has made it clear that they are flatly going to do so in the case of spell power level.
Will the final version of spells be powerful enough for you? I have no idea. Heck, I dunno if it will be the right power level for me, either. Will the final game be to your liking in other ways? Again, no idea, though I suspect it will be at least as close to my desires as PF1 is.
But evidence suggests that they are willing to change things, which was my primary point of disagreement with you there (as you said they weren't).
Really, I'm just not sure at all that these things (tight math aside, anyway) are nearly as set in stone as you seem to think they are.At this point, where I've personally stopped participating in the playtest, for me it's about how optimistic I am about the general direction. Again, I can totally still be wrong. But from what I've seen, the indicators point in a different direction than they do for you.I'm not necessarily arguing the final game will be to your liking, I'm just saying that evidence suggests that Paizo is willing to change things and, indeed, has made it clear that they are flatly going to do so in the case of spell power level.
Will the final version of spells be powerful enough for you? I have no idea. Heck, I dunno if it will be the right power level for me, either. Will the final game be to your liking in other ways? Again, no idea, though I suspect it will be at least as close to my desires as PF1 is.
But evidence suggests that they are willing to change things, which was my primary point of disagreement with you there (as you said they weren't).
Fair enough. I got kind of a different impression from the last weeks, but explaining that would go into my personal paranoia, which helps nobody. We'll just have to wait it out.
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Yeah, they are changing things, and this upcoming Paladin sounds quite substantial (hoping for some Smite action), but the changes so far, are not very big, or daring (except for Resonance, I guess), nothing underlying (chassis, systems, etc); fixing things like spell damage is easy, just like monster math.
In terms of spells, they explicitly fixed only the damage spells for this exact reason. They very clearly stated it was their intention to power up spells in general...it was just very difficult to do that with non-damaging spells in an ongoing playtest, so the others would need to wait.
As for chassis changes...they've actually changed some pretty meaningful structural stuff with Ancestries and Classes, plus the Resonance change, plus they've ditched Signature Skills altogether (a change about which I rejoiced). They do seem pretty set on adding level to everything...but then that's not a super unpopular thing (unlike Signature Skills and Resonance, which were). Some people certainly don't like it, but others do (I rather like it for reasons of simplicity, for example).
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Yeah, they are changing things, and this upcoming Paladin sounds quite substantial (hoping for some Smite action), but the changes so far, are not very big, or daring (except for Resonance, I guess), nothing underlying (chassis, systems, etc); fixing things like spell damage is easy, just like monster math.Fair enough. I got kind of a different impression from the last weeks, but explaining that would go into my personal paranoia, which helps nobody. We'll just have to wait it out.Really, I'm just not sure at all that these things (tight math aside, anyway) are nearly as set in stone as you seem to think they are.At this point, where I've personally stopped participating in the playtest, for me it's about how optimistic I am about the general direction. Again, I can totally still be wrong. But from what I've seen, the indicators point in a different direction than they do for you.I'm not necessarily arguing the final game will be to your liking, I'm just saying that evidence suggests that Paizo is willing to change things and, indeed, has made it clear that they are flatly going to do so in the case of spell power level.
Will the final version of spells be powerful enough for you? I have no idea. Heck, I dunno if it will be the right power level for me, either. Will the final game be to your liking in other ways? Again, no idea, though I suspect it will be at least as close to my desires as PF1 is.
But evidence suggests that they are willing to change things, which was my primary point of disagreement with you there (as you said they weren't).
as long as they don't fix fundamental flaws of the chassis, like the +level/everything - and they explicitly stated that they don't intend to do that - PF2 will stay a problematic system tht is simply not a worthy successor of what came before. I mean, they can fix a lot of things, untested by us, and publish the book, but if the fundemental flaws are not tackled, then I agree with magnuskn, that PF1 remains the superior product when it comes to at least my desires of what a Fantasy RPG should look - and feel - like
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Oh, I am still running part #7: End of 2evangelion, so at least I will get to complete the playtest, even if it is not with the full two groups as I would have liked.
Fair enough.
That said, the math may be the easiest issues for Paizo to fix in a white room environment, but the currently broken monster math still affected the playtesting and will continue to do so. I feel as though all of my playtesting efforts have been for naught because of the bonkers monster math, and that if Paizo had stopped the playtest for a moment to fine-tune the bestiary, my players and I would have actually gotten to test the game more thoroughly rather than having most of our efforts cut short by one TPK after another.
That's also fair.
However, for whatever reason, most groups have not had TPKs to the extent you have, certainly not to the extent that they prevent the testing of other system elements in the way they did for you. I haven't had a single one in my group, for example (though Drakus was a near thing, and Chapter 5 looks likely to result in the intended one).
Which means that most people have indeed been able to test other stuff even with the screwed up monster math. The fact that you haven't is unfortunate, but momentum is important in a process like this and 'pausing' the playtest or retasking resources away from other stuff (like other updates) in order to fix the monster math seems likely to cost more players and thus more playtesting than the route they went, which makes their decision a pretty sound one from Paizo's perspective, and that of making a good game.
I suspect pausing to revise the Bestiary would've also resulted in a better play experience, but that is a secondary consideration in playtesting, and I don't begrudge them not doing it.
as long as they don't fix fundamental flaws of the chassis, like the +level/everything - and they explicitly stated that they don't intend to do that - PF2 will stay a problematic system tht is simply not a worthy successor of what came before.
If you consider adding level to everything a fundamental flaw with the chassis then I absolutely agree that PF2 will not be the game for you. That opinion, however, is not remotely universal. Or even in the majority as near as I can tell.
Yeah For UTEML My preference and I'm sure you've seen me say this before would be to have almost every feat naturally improve when its realavent proficiency move up (like cat fall). I would say instead of item bonuses the item should expand the effect. So like double swim speed or jumping height etc. Weapon damage I'm hesitant about but people did make a good point I could see spliting the bonus between level and magic items. I don't want conditions too streamlined where everything feels too generic.
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Of course I'm just one guy with a loud mouth, but for me, personally, I am still not too hopeful that the final released product will be something I'll be interested in playing. I'll be getting the PDF for 10 bucks, for sure. But unless the ruleset in that electronic file convinces me thoroughly, I see little hope that I'll change to 2E.
Our group just started our first homebrew campaign in 9 years and I'm working on the next one that we'll play after our current Starfinder game ends. We've pretty much made up our mind and the playtest was instrumental in helping us do this.
I'm not necessarily arguing the final game will be to your liking, I'm just saying that evidence suggests that Paizo is willing to change things
I've not seen any indicator they're willing to change the fundamental issues I've seen. Threads made in good faith to engage Paizo in a discussion on those issues have also been met with either silence or silence followed by a single post to lock the thread. This might indicate to you that they're willing to completely overhaul the system. It does not indicate that for me.
That's certainly your prerogative, but I'm much more optimistic based on the changes we've already seen and particularly due to the acknowledgements of several ongoing issues.
It's nice for you to have so much optimism. I've had Jason Buhlman flat out tell me he doesn't think the new edition will be for me. So it's a bit harder for me to share your optimism.
If you consider adding level to everything a fundamental flaw with the chassis then I absolutely agree that PF2 will not be the game for you. That opinion, however, is not remotely universal. Or even in the majority as near as I can tell.
The people I personally know who've participated have all responded this is a fundamental issue they have with this game (my group didn't end up playtesting together but a couple of them did playtest with other groups) and is a big part of what they dislike about the new edition. Not a single one of them (despite my urgings) filled in surveys or posted on these forums. I don't think we have any way of knowing what is and isn't the majority opinion of the existing fanbase and I worry that Paizo doesn't know either. Ultimately we won't know for at least 12-36 months down the road. May Paizo live in interesting times.
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Yeah I don't think its to late for that but It might be to late for the core. I think the concept was to have the skills open up cool legendary implementations for martial action. like the intimidate that kills feels pretty legendary. I think the problem with having to much locked behind the proficiencys is some classes don't ever get legendary prof in something. That might not be to bad as long as everyone gets something to make up for it.
My base idea in addition to having the skill feats work like I said would be to have some basic mechanic built into all the proficiency. basically something similar to evasion. say instead of giving the fighter the feat where on a miss he deals minimum that should be a fact of having say Expert (maybe?) proficiency with a weapon. while say maybe master would make it so 1's don't automatically reduce your result a step. Something like that anyways.
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as long as they don't fix fundamental flaws of the chassis, like the +level/everything - and they explicitly stated that they don't intend to do that - PF2If you consider adding level to everything a fundamental flaw with the chassis then I absolutely agree that PF2 will not be the game for you. That opinion, however, is not remotely universal. Or even in the majority as near as I can tell.
As is all too common with discussions on the internet, I think that a lot of folks are sticking to comfortable spaces where most participants share a common POV. I'd agree that the majority of folks posting in the playtest forums are more-or-less on board the PF2e train. However, it's interesting to compare this optimism with comments elsewhere, this being one nearby example and a rather tame one compared to some discussions outside of the Paizo forums.
Yeah I don't think its to late for that but It might be to late for the core. I think the concept was to have the skills open up cool legendary implementations for martial action. like the intimidate that kills feels pretty legendary.Yeah, but that goes overboard, for me, and comes across as a Chuck Norris joke; I would prefer more epic stunts, swimming for days, wrestling giants, ripping a demon's head off with your bare hands, and such.
I think having legendary social effects are a little tricky really. most of the ones that come to my mind involve copying spells. So like legendary diplomacy would be a lot like dominate person. Hmm so for the ripping of the demon head would this be done like grapple damage or like a fort save or die? (Just so we are on the same rail)
Yeah I don't think its to late for that but It might be to late for the core. I think the concept was to have the skills open up cool legendary implementations for martial action. like the intimidate that kills feels pretty legendary.Yeah, but that goes overboard, for me, and comes across as a Chuck Norris joke; I would prefer more epic stunts, swimming for days, wrestling giants, ripping a demon's head off with your bare hands, and such.1) I think having legendary social effects are a little tricky really. most of the ones that come to my mind involve copying spells. So like legendary diplomacy would be a lot like dominate person.
2) Hmm so for the ripping of the demon head would this be done like grapple damage or like a fort save or die? (Just so we are on the same rail)
1) Yes, I find social skills, and skills in general, do not play that well with combat in D&D, as it is not a skill-based system.
2) Not sure, maybe a combination of a critical grapple check and a failed save or something. I think of that scene in Conan the Destroyer, where he rips the demon's horn out of its forehead.
Oh that's kind of a cool idea so it could be like a legendary skill feat for athletics? (I think grapple is athletic now right?) On a crit on a grapple they get a fort save or POP! Vorpal grapple!
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I've indeed found that, besides the writing of Doomsday, the bestiary numbers are the biggest weakpoint in 2E. In my homebrew games, I traditionally use 0 offical monsters, only running homebrew monsters. The games I've done this for 2E have gone great.
As is all too common with discussions on the internet, I think that a lot of folks are sticking to comfortable spaces where most participants share a common POV. I'd agree that the majority of folks posting in the playtest forums are more-or-less on board the PF2e train. However, it's interesting to compare this optimism with comments elsewhere, this being one nearby example and a rather tame one compared to some discussions outside of the Paizo forums.as long as they don't fix fundamental flaws of the chassis, like the +level/everything - and they explicitly stated that they don't intend to do that - PF2If you consider adding level to everything a fundamental flaw with the chassis then I absolutely agree that PF2 will not be the game for you. That opinion, however, is not remotely universal. Or even in the majority as near as I can tell.
I've been around pretty much all discussion outside the Paizo forums. I actually find this site to be the most negative (still not that negative compared to other playtests I've participated in). For example the facebook group is extremely positive. Reddit hasn't really been negative in a while (not too many people seem to post there though.)
I find that to be an outrageous claim, on the very face of it.I've been around pretty much all discussion outside the Paizo forums.As is all too common with discussions on the internet, I think that a lot of folks are sticking to comfortable spaces where most participants share a common POV. I'd agree that the majority of folks posting in the playtest forums are more-or-less on board the PF2e train. However, it's interesting to compare this optimism with comments elsewhere, this being one nearby example and a rather tame one compared to some discussions outside of the Paizo forums.as long as they don't fix fundamental flaws of the chassis, like the +level/everything - and they explicitly stated that they don't intend to do that - PF2If you consider adding level to everything a fundamental flaw with the chassis then I absolutely agree that PF2 will not be the game for you. That opinion, however, is not remotely universal. Or even in the majority as near as I can tell.
I lurk a lot dude.
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Ursus' claim isn't that outrageous. I've been in these forums, on reddit, on two Pf2 related discord servers, and on an entirely unrelated discord server that's had PF2 come up frequently in its RPG channel. Throw Facebook and a popular forum over the discord servers and you've got most the popular discussion forums covered