Edge is saying that if you have expressed a distaste for those effects and talked with your GM about not including them, only a bad GM is going to not at least come to a compromise with you.
Many GMs simply choose to stick to the rules in the books for valid reasons.
They're not bad GMs because they stick the rules of the game that they paid for.
Many of the people responding to me in this thread have made it pretty clear that they wouldn't remove such effects from the game, and even that they would consider doing so a 'disservice' to the player.
Then there's also PFS play where they simply aren't allowed to make such compromises, which is, for many, the only reliable game that can be found.
EDIT: Also, your second statement makes no sense. Adding new things to a game is vastly harder than removing them, because creating balanced game elements is hard. Otherwise why would Paizo even have jobs?
I mean, which of these is harder:
A) Saying that goblins don't exist in your setting.
B) Designing stat blocks, ecologies, and cultures for goblins from scratch and fitting them into your setting.
Breaking something might be easier than building it, rebuilding something that is broken is often just as difficult as building it was in the first place, if not more difficult.
If I remove Goblins from my Rise of the Runelords game I'm really going to mess up the first book of that adventure, so that'd make things quite difficult.
If I remove paralyzed forever from monsters/spells then I have to figure out something to replace it with. Removing an ability from a creature/spell throws off the balance of that creature/spell so you still have to do the work of adding something in to the game.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Back when we had the BECMI sets, most monsters special abilities were a brutal "save or die". A simple 2 HD giant spider, as I said earlier in this thread, could kill a lvl 36 character outright on a hit + natural 1, and had much, much higher chances of killing a lower level character with a single bite. A wraith's touch drained levels permanently with no save. Gygaxians thought all of this was FUN; I did too. Though scared of those effects, I never thought about removing them.
I missed most of AD&D, switching directly to the 3.0 edition (which I didn't have the chance to actually play, unfortunately, though between my brother and me we had the basic manuals and several other books).
That system was less nasty, and less likely to kill a character on a single, failed save; abilities like poison and level draining were toned down, they were resistable, curable, and generally much less scary. Honestly, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Pathfinder ironed out some of the worst offenders that were left (giving an additional save to Phantasmal Killer, or allowing a save every round to shrug off an Hold Person, for example). Save-or-suck spells and other abilities (Black Tentacles and Slumber Hex are the first that come to my mind), anyway, were still very powerful, and an optimized caster could dominate encounters. In most cases this had a simple reason: even a single round of forced inactivity was usually enough to let the martial allies slaughter the enemy with impunity.
As for permanent effects, we had them. Blindness/Deafness is one: fail the save and you can't see/hear anymore until the spell is cancelled somehow.
Now, we should discriminate between players and enemies. While a blind NPC or monster will probably stay like that for a single round anyway, many consider such an outcome anticlimatic when it happens to important/boss type enemies. A PC suffering long-term consequences on a single failed roll, or even just sucking and getting bored for the duration of the fight (which could mean a few hours in real-time), are a bane for other people like Ninja.
Personally, I think it's part of the risk of adventuring, so I'm mostly ok with that as a consequence of bad luck and/or bad planning interacting with scary monsters.
Of course the surprise attack happened with the other suspect coming through the door, and of course both opponent had sneak attack, and of course I rolled 1 for initiative. My Witch went from full HP to -1 before she could react, and they didn't even roll too well.
PF2 takes ability damage away, so that poisons now do HP damage (and they seem deadlier than before, but still no instant death unless you are already wounded).
Save-or-suck abilities are redesigned so that their full effect only takes place on a critically failed save, and balances that with a little temporary debuff on a success. I think the OP should be very happy about this direction, but he is of the idea that it's still too little a step and asks for the complete removal of such effects (unless coming from multiple stacking failures) instead. I think it's just too much.
By the way, I'm baffled at Power Word-like spells, which trump everything and just kill/stun/whatever without a save. Why??
If I remove paralyzed forever from monsters/spells then I have to figure out something to replace it with. Removing an ability from a creature/spell throws off the balance of that creature/spell so you still have to do the work of adding something in to the game.
What about just granting a new save every round, like Hold Person does? Could it work for you?
I'm going to disagree with you, Ninja. As someone who has GM'd for over a decade and has a lot of pride in what I do:
If a player comes to you and says "this kind of content isn't fun for me and I'd prefer not to play in a game with it", you either work out a solution or you tell the player your game isn't for them.
If you try to force unfun content on a player, you are a bad GM. Full stop.
Obviously Pathfinder Society is different. I've never played in Society, so my opinions aren't really fitted to it. I'll bow out of that subset of the discussion.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The issue with making blanket "you're a bad GM if you don't do XYZ" accusations is that it often makes extreme assumptions about the skill and experience of a GM. Pathfinder is an extremely crunchy game with many interconnected parts, and a sane default reaction to that is to not make any changes for fear of breaking something important.
In order to make systemic changes to Pathfinder to suit player preferences, you need to first have a great deal of system mastery. You need to know more than the already demanding issue of knowing what all this does offhand, you need to know the place of the disliked mechanic in the design. Mind that we don't have monster creation rules yet, so a newer GM can't be expected to know how to snip out something like permanent paralysis and replace it with an equally strong alternative. And as already brought up, it wreaks havoc on any form of organized play, which does not have to mean Pathfinder Society. If you aren't the only GM, you have less agency to make big tweaks like that. And this is all assuming the ability can be removed outright; if it can't because it's an important part of a monster's identity, the GM has the more daunting task of designing a similar replacement.
Now, specifically about save-or-effectively-die spells, the issue with just making them work only part of the time is that part of the time they will work through no fault of the player. "They only activate on a critical fail" doesn't even mean the same thing it does in PF1, critical failures don't just happen on a 1 anymore. Crits are common. It doesn't matter if the ability only kills 5% of the time or 0.5% of the time, when it's already happened the player isn't going to think they deserved to have their character taken away or miss out on most of the session they can only attend once a month just because the GM is assuring them that the odds were so remote.
Comparisons to games you played 30 years ago or more also aren't terribly helpful because PF2 isn't an OSR game. You accepted characters dying for no good reason because they barely took any effort to make in the first place. AD&D and 3.0 are fundamentally different games, and the difference between AD&D and Pathfinder even more so as the latter has explicitly embraced its role as a power fantasy wargame. Stats actually matter in Pathfinder, higher level characters can take hours to make, and low level characters have had their HP inflated compared to previous 3.5 derived games specifically to remove the systemically enforced grindhouse feel of low level play. Hell, you don't even have the option to roll for HP, just so some PC's don't implode on impact despite the player wanting to be a tank.
Dying in 3.0+ means a lot more and players are expected to use their characters for much longer. There isn't an expectation that you have a backup character rolled up, and there is often the expectation that a PC have some sort of plot relevance to the campaign because that's cool and fun. It's been this way since 2003, with OSR just being its own thing.
Iunno, I really don't like it when completely different games are brought to dismiss criticism of this game as wrongfun. The implication is that other players are just not "hardcore" enough or whatever that means. Ninja's criticism is valid.
---
I think it might be a small oversight of the Hero Point system. It's clearly meant to undo b#+!%$@+ like just dying spontaneously, but if something slightly better than death happens it instead merely lets you reroll the save while spending twice as many hero points, which players have no guarantee of actually having. You go from a guarantee that you'll get to play for at least a turn to maybe a 70% chance of nothing bad happening at all.
I think letting players spend a point to recover from permanent conditions after a few turns is fair enough. Tables that want a "let the dice fall where they may" feel can just play without Hero Points fairly easily, or at least restrict its uses. It's a fairly self contained system that's easy to modify by most GMs. Everyone else can avoid dumb situations where stabbing the character in the heart is less of an issue than making them paralyzed.
Ideally, I'd have the whole limited plot armor thing be a separate resource than Hero Points. Like, literally call it Plot Armor, you either have it or you don't, and you only gain it when you would normally be awarded a Hero Point. And then it does everything spending 1 Hero point currently does + the not being permanently paralyzed thing. Players no longer horde the points as insurance and dying is scary since you can't have up to 3 lives. You lose Plot Armor when you use it, and you don't get it back automatically like you do regular Hero Points, you have to do something to justify having Plot Armor again. Also makes it easier for tables that don't like players escaping death to cut that bit out without touching Hero Points themselves.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think it would better and more simple to simply reduce the cost of using a hero point to re-roll saves (or other things) to a single point. And then the people that don't like that could simply use an optional rule to void hero points from their game.
I am personally a subscriber to the idea that games need to carry risks (including character deaths and permanent effects) for the action to be more exciting however when I'm GMing I would normally make sure that the players would have an opportunity to remove the permanent effect in a reasonable timeframe. That might take a couple of hours of real-time gaming, and in that time the player would simply help me control monsters, npcs etc.
Adventuring carries risks with or without permanent paralysis from a crit fail. To imply otherwise would be to imply that there's only a handful of monsters that have any real risks, that the game is only ever fun when you're fighting liches. That's clearly not the case, you can get your ass ate by a dragon just fine with HP damage alone. Even if you use Hero Points or my suggested Plot Armor, you're gonna run out if you don't take the first opportunity to book it.
The difference is that the risk of death in PF2 normally requires you to f@!~ up repeatedly or for you to be outmatched and unable to retreat. That's still dangerous, you can't f$+% around, but you can mitigate the risk considerably without literally making it so the enemy never has a chance to attack. It's always something more than just a series of dice rolls. Clearly the issue isn't the possibility of failure, it's whether the player has any meaningful agency to avoid failure. Additional dice rolls are not agency, they're just making it less likely for a b+!$@*#% situation to come up in the first place even though most times it happens it's going to feel like b*@#*&~* regardless.
The problem with relying on re-rolling saves is that it is strictly worse when dealing with effective character death than, well, actual character death. RAW and RAI, characters a guaranteed way to cheat death, so it seems inconsistent that permanent effects that remove most or all of a player's agency don't have a similar ability to get around them, guaranteed. Again, just rolling twice on a save isn't giving the player agency, the problem may have been that the DC was really high to begin with and targetted an especially weak save, and nothing is stopping the dice from just crit failing again through no fault of the player. It's kind of a non-choice, so making that random
It'd also have the knock-on effect of players rerolling saves all the time for things that aren't literally going to take their character out of commission forever. I know I wouldn't ever spend my three hero points on a measley extra action, that's three whole saves I could ignore! Or two, if I wanted to keep a way to not die in my pocket.
I also imagine using an entire hero point to cure something other than death isn't something players would normally do if they actually do have reasonable access to restorative magic.
More generally, my gripe with how Hero Points are set up is that spending points is treated as an extreme risk, which doesn't necessarily lead to players doing lots of fun stuff to earn those points If I roleplay well and I get two points and I spend all three to get an extra action for a turn, and then a series of freak rolls kills my character, it's going to feel like I got punished for having fun. Had I played in a way the system clearly isn't intended to promote where I just horde the points, my character would be alive.
That's why I'd rather have the anti-b&@%@+&$ option just be its own pool with a smaller limit, so that people can't cheat death multiple turns in a row with no risk because they gave up doing more active and fun things. They get one get out of death/permanent paralysis free card, and then they have to scramble to safety because the next hit will actually kill them (or they have to do something supremely awesome enough to get a hero point back so they regain plot armor, which fair enough). It's easy enough then for GM's to get rid of plot armor or hero points, or possibly both.
@Helmic:
I can see your point, and I guess it comes down to a matter of taste.
You say that we can't compare a 30 years old game with PF2, because they are very different; while true, the stories these games are telling are more or less the same: adventurers going against perilous situations, fighting monsters who can do a vast array of very nasty things to them, for the sake of riches, experience, and sometimes saving the world.
Those adventurers can be killed, eaten alive, disintegrated, turned into frogs or statues or shadows... that's part of the risk, and part of the fun.
I know, you are talking about player agency in trying to avoid these bad outcomes. It's a very good point, but since we are rolling dice for most decisions, a random factor will always be in the game. How big an impact this randomness should have is, as I said above, a matter of taste.
In my previous post I wrote about the direction this series of games is going. Maybe we will get to the point where death (actual or effective) only comes as a result of bad player choices and no random factor; right now, for me, it would be too much.
Now, hero points. I have already criticized how this the playtest is treating them, both in how they are awarded and how they are used.
On this topic I'm on your side. Spending an hero point on your turn to shrug off any single condition is a good thing to have, IMO, when the same hero point can save you from death by HP.
Using that on a reroll may be ok because you take the risk but, if successful, you can also act on your next turn instead of spending that time getting rid of the negative effect.
For sure, it shouldn't cost MORE than ignoring a fatal wound.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I should clarify that I don't mean "you are a bad GM" as an absolute and eternal judgement.
Most people spend a while as a bad GM and eventually grow out of it with experience. I was a terrible GM when I first started.
...That said, if a player comes to you and says "this really isn't fun for me", I would hope that as a human being with empathy and the general knowledge that this is supposed to be a fun hobby you would at least try to come up with a solution. And also hopefully we can agree that if someone is intentionally trying to make the game unfun for someone else that shouldn't just be handwaved away as "they are new"?
I can see your point, and I guess it comes down to a matter of taste.
For sure, tastes are going to vary. But the presence of dice rolling in general in PF2 doesn't mean that there has to be straight up lose conditions that can trigger before a player could possibly react. I mean, clearly it doesn't, because most of the game doesn't operate like that. There's a whole bestiary full of stuff that doesn't do that. The issue comes up when it can catch a GM by surprise, and since the rest of the game sets a very different expectation it's probably frustrating when the game breaks that expectation. I don't see many tweaks asking to make it so PC's die more to singular die rolls with no chance to act in between, so I'm more inclined to think this is a "black coffee" situation where most people don't admit their actual preferences because it's seen as less sophisticated somehow.
And yeah, just to reiterate in case I didn't phrase it clearly before, my fix isn't to just make rerolling saves cheaper but to have a way to just always, with no saves involved, get back up. The player has to tacitly admit they were just effectively killed right then and there since they're sacrificing their ability to come back from death, but they still stand up.
I should clarify that I don't mean "you are a bad GM" as an absolute and eternal judgement.
Most people spend a while as a bad GM and eventually grow out of it with experience. I was a terrible GM when I first started.
...That said, if a player comes to you and says "this really isn't fun for me", I would hope that as a human being with empathy and the general knowledge that this is supposed to be a fun hobby you would at least try to come up with a solution. And also hopefully we can agree that if someone is intentionally trying to make the game unfun for someone else that shouldn't just be handwaved away as "they are new"?
Thing is, you still seem to be coming at this with a value judgement, that the GM isn't just inexperienced but is actively being a dick. And, at least in my experience, that's not what actually happens. What happens is the new GM literally cannot make the changes the player wants to the system, because they don't know how. They don't know how to modify a monster while keeping it CR appropriate, they don't know what monsters may have the ability that the player doesn't like, they probably haven't read every single line of every ability a monster has until it actually comes up at the table and then oh s*$% this is permanent. Hell, the player probably doesn't know they hate it until it comes up, they probably don't expect that sort of thing to exist in this game since it doesn't exist in 99% of it.
That's my fundamental issue with that take, it confuses capacity to change the system with unwillingness. When I say inexperienced, I don't mean lacking the experience to know that GMing is about letting your players have fun, I mean lacking the experience to know that liches can even do that in the first place and then lacking the experience to know how to fix it properly. Hell, we still don't have the monster creation rules yet, so most people in this thread probably wouldn't really know how much worth to really assign to that one ability, at least not without experience having used that particular monster before.
That's why I chose to instead give a concrete example of a change that could be made, with ease of modification in mind. It's basically an on/off switch for exactly this issue, defaulting to "on" on the assumption that permanent paralysis isn't supposed to be worse than death and is instead just a weird fluke that can happen if restorative items aren't available. It also allows people who really like random deaths to not have the Hero Point system get in their way. It addresses what OP was actually saying, in a way that I hope would be satisfactory for them.
If we think someone is a "bad" GM who hasn't learned how to play nice yet, we're not really going to consider their feedback to be valid. Not saying that the answer to someone's feedback is never "if you're not doing this you're not being very fair to your players" but care has to be taken before saying something like that. It's very easy for experienced GM's to forget what being new was like, and the things we might just think to do like casually rework the entire bestiary aren't always possible for others for a myraid of extremely valid reasons, including just time or energy.
That's what I'm trying to get through, because there's people in the thread just openly admitting they're s!#%posting to get the thread locked. That's not really in the spirit of the opening pages of the game that ask us to keep an open mind as a community and be mindful of the needs of others. It's not the thread itself that's toxic (nor you!), but rather that assumption of bad faith. OP has a valid point.
I should clarify that I don't mean "you are a bad GM" as an absolute and eternal judgement.
Most people spend a while as a bad GM and eventually grow out of it with experience. I was a terrible GM when I first started.
...That said, if a player comes to you and says "this really isn't fun for me", I would hope that as a human being with empathy and the general knowledge that this is supposed to be a fun hobby you would at least try to come up with a solution. And also hopefully we can agree that if someone is intentionally trying to make the game unfun for someone else that shouldn't just be handwaved away as "they are new"?
This doesnt make you a bad GM in every situation, finding a solution isnt always possible without issues and having the player either deal with it or leave the table is perfectly acceptable.
Dont forget, this often isnt a solo game. Sure, if you have for some reason 1 player, then you can work around, jump systems, do whatever is best for the two of you have fun.
That isnt the case for a vast majority of games. Often there are 3/4 players at a table, if one single player doesnt like something, doesnt mean it will be worked out of the game by any means if the GM and the others do.
Sometimes people disagree on what is fun, that is normal and happens often, role playing games arent something beyond this. This playtest is full of this thread after thread.
That is why sessions 0 are relevant to atleast try to bring everyone to the same page and make sure everyone should even be sitting on that table. Cause yes, sometimes it is best to let go of a player or of a table than try to fit someone who has different tastes in.
I can see your point, and I guess it comes down to a matter of taste.For sure, tastes are going to vary. But the presence of dice rolling in general in PF2 doesn't mean that there has to be straight up lose conditions that can trigger before a player could possibly react. I mean, clearly it doesn't, because most of the game doesn't operate like that. There's a whole bestiary full of stuff that doesn't do that. The issue comes up when it can catch a GM by surprise, and since the rest of the game sets a very different expectation it's probably frustrating when the game breaks that expectation. I don't see many tweaks asking to make it so PC's die more to singular die rolls with no chance to act in between, so I'm more inclined to think this is a "black coffee" situation where most people don't admit their actual preferences because it's seen as less sophisticated somehow.
And what about enemies? Is it ok that they can be oneshotted before they can react, due to luck, good planning or sheer PC badassery?
While it can be anticlimatic in certain cases, I'm pretty sure that most players will say that aye, it's ok.Well, I'm also sure that at least a part of those players would hate having different treatment for PCs in respect to NPCs, because there was a thread about that some time ago on these boards (PF1 area). They want to advantage, no bias, no fudging, because it would kill their fun.
Of course, they still have to rely on the adventure writer and the GM to not make the BBEG show up 4-5 levels earlier to deal personally with those pesky adventurers the first time they mess with his plans; but I don't want to digress.
My point is, you can't make everyone happy.
And yeah, just to reiterate in case I didn't phrase it clearly before, my fix isn't to just make rerolling saves cheaper but to have a way to just always, with no saves involved, get back up. The player has to tacitly admit they were just effectively killed right then and there since they're sacrificing their ability to come back from death, but they still stand up.
It was probably me who wasn't totally clear. Just like you, I was trying to say that in addition to making this option cheaper, players should be able to spend an hero point to shake off any single condition affecting them, just like they shake off death.
I added the reroll part because I would also keep that option: my idea is that you can either reroll and try to avoid the condition entirely before it affects you, or get hit by that and then spend your turn in the heroic effort to shrug it off. In the first case you are taking a risk by rolling again, in the second one you remove the condition with certainty, but not before you suffer some consequences from it.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Well, I'm also sure that at least a part of those players would hate having different treatment for PCs in respect to NPCs, because there was a thread about that some time ago on these boards (PF1 area). They want to advantage, no bias, no fudging, because it would kill their fun... My point is, you can't make everyone happy.
I mean, nearly every tabletop RPG with combat is going to involve the presence of mooks, yes, but I don't think accomomodating such an odd group would be particularly diffiult. At that point the group just wants extremely 50/50 kinds of combat where individual enemies are even matches, which I think is not what virtually any group actually wants when they talk about combat being "easy" or whatever. Like I think a lot of that is just "black coffee" posturing, but as a GM you could cater to that preference by using the same mechanics to keep mooks popping up, though that sounds more annoying than anything.
Players can oneshot NPC's because nobody cares about mooks, the GM isn't going to be unable to play at all that night because some rando gobbo got rekt. GM's going to be just as hyped that a player just oneshot something. PC's are different, they're supposed to be actual characters and action heroes, so them dying like a mook to a random fluke isn't quite as acceptable.
Like I suppose a GM could maybe want to implement Plot Armor for baddies? I don't think it'd be great as a direct 1-to-1, but I can see a fun situation where the players spend a Hero Point to give to an NPC so that the NPC gets plot armor, as a way for players to designate that they want this enemy to be a recurring villain or to protect their party mascot from stray arrows.
Just like you, I was trying to say that in addition to making this option cheaper, players should be able to spend an hero point to shake off any single condition affecting them, just like they shake off death.
Ah, then yeah. That's why I'd rather have those things be in separate pools, where the guaranteed "you get back up same turn" ability is something you can only do once before needing to do something notable again and is virtually the same as dying since it gets rid of the one "extra life" you had. I think so long the pools are separate, players will still want to use their Hero Points to reroll saves since that's generally going to be better than losing their Plot Armor. Plot Armor wouldn't come back automatically every session, it'd have to be earned by earning a Hero Point during play and then it'd persist between sessions, so it's something to be hoarded unlike Hero Points.