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As to purely PF1 Canon stories, with alchemist being split from wizard spell mechanics, we sort of lose the ability for the alchemist in the party being able to steal access to the party's wizard, in order to learn how to make a fly potion.
That's actually a pretty salient point, as one of the Pathfinder Tales novels explicitly has an alchemist deriving formulae from a wizard's spellbook and then using said formulae to do wizardy things later.
I, personally, vastly prefer alchemists as actually using alchemy and having a bunch of alchemical items like they do in the playtest instead of just being "potion wizards", but it legitimately is a change in canon that directly affects how one of the novels played out.
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There are more minor examples of that as well. Some APs have alchemists sneak into places using extracts of flight and invisibility, for example. Currently I don't think there is a way to do that, but if we don't eventually get some elixirs to make you undetectable and capable of scaling walls casually I'll be shocked.
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Character concepts are not Canon paizo stories. Canon paizo stories are fiction published in paizo books, including adventure paths. Goblins attacking Sandpoint is Canon. The Paladin you used to fight them off is not.
PC builds aren't relevant to this thread, frankly. There's a bajillion paladin threads already, or build threads or what have you. This is looking for contradictions in source material.
We have to agree to disagree here. To me, a complete change in how an important part of the heroes of Golarion look, fight, and feel is a major change to the canon. RPGs are about the characters. It doesn't matter if its is in a game or from fiction, a PF1 paladin and a PF2 paladin embody two different concepts. A PF1 paladin from fiction, if it in any way emulates the paladin from the game, cannot be represented by a playtest paladin.
Paladins are called just that, and this makes the change even more important. If they had changed the fighter in a similar way, I would have minded less, as "fighter" isn't really an in game concept. The world has men-at-arms, soldiers, gladiators, mercenaries, weapon specialists, a host of warrior concepts best played as the fighter class as long as they work mechanically - but none of which need to conceptually be of the fighter class or that would be called fighters in world. Only in meta-talk would someone say "hey, fighter" except perhaps in a sporting context. When used in its most general way, "fighter" would include anyone who fights, which of course includes paladins, rangers, barbarians, many rogues, etc, etc. Because Fighter is a class, I tend to use warrior as my inclusive term for anyone who fights, but fighter is the normal word for anyone who engages in physical combat.
But paladin IS an in-world concept, clearly marked and differentiated. You might actually call someone "sir paladin" in the game world, since paladins are rare and very distinct. That is why they have all these special behavior rules. Not every 'fighter' qualifies to be a paladin. Thus a change to what the word "paladin" refers to is a change to the world. A lot of people who called paladins in world before the change will no longer be of the paladin class. That is why I would have preferred if the playtest paladin changed the name, so that "paladin" became just another in-game word that does not point to a specific class, like man-at-arms.
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On the teleport balance issue, what teleport needs in not a long casting time - it is a long arrival time. Star Trek and its transporter often have this issue - people are starting to flicker into existence, but it takes a while for them to stabilize. This need not be a huge amount of time, say 1 minute, and the teleportees all spend their first turn after arriving orienting themselves to the exclusion of all other action. If you add the teleportation arrival making noise and smelling ozone, this would stop scry-and fry and make teleport more useful for escape than for attack.
If you add the teleportation arrival making noise and smelling ozone, this would stop scry-and fry and make teleport more useful for escape than for attack.
It depends on what we consider the purpose of teleport to be. A prelude to assassination? An easy escape route? A way to bypass traps and avoid opportunity attacks? The ability to win races against time? A way to travel from point A to point B without having any encounters along the way? A way to go shopping and sleep safely in a city without breaking off your adventures?
One of my favorite sessions of 3.5 I ever ran had a PC use teleport to go shopping in the middle of a fight.
Now I've got this vision of some merchant announcing a sale while a fight happens to be going on nearby, and one of the combatants just loses control . . . .
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Keeping in mind that I don't like this answer:
Doesn't the NPCs-aren't-built-like-PCs feature of the playtest negate any assertion that a nth-level x can't do something anymore? Since, presumably, if they want an NPC to do it they'll just give them the ability to do it?
Seems like the only limitations the new ruleset technically puts are on the PC side of the narrative.
I kinda get people's reservations on this but really, it makes a lot more sense when you rephrase it as:
The GM can make whatever he needs for his adventure (But should strive to keep the power level within what the party can handle, hence CR guidelines), but the players can't likewise just literally make whatever powers they want without GM permission.
I mean, obviously this can be abused and shouldn't don't get me wrong. But IMO the GM needs to be able to do what they need to do but if the players had the same power to do whatever without having to follow the standard rules it would be chaos.
And monsters, and perhaps even NPCs, have always had powers and items PCs couldn't, PF2 is just a little more transparent about it. There was even a big thread that turned into an argument about this kind of thing and ended with Mark and Jason B. confirming that this kind of thing happened in PF1.
And come on, I can't be the only one who has homebrewed unique abilities and stuff for custom bosses, right?
I mean, not that I don't give such treats to my players too sometimes, but it's not necessarily the same treats.
Sure I've done this. But if it was something that could reasonably be learned, and not species-locked, then it's always been available for them to learn too. Otherwise the universe doesn't make sense. "He can do that because he isn't a PC" doesn't do it for me or anyone else I know.
If you add the teleportation arrival making noise and smelling ozone, this would stop scry-and fry and make teleport more useful for escape than for attack.It depends on what we consider the purpose of teleport to be. A prelude to assassination? An easy escape route? A way to bypass traps and avoid opportunity attacks? The ability to win races against time? A way to travel from point A to point B without having any encounters along the way? A way to go shopping and sleep safely in a city without breaking off your adventures?
I ws trying to get around scry-and-fry and teleport assassinations, yes. Basically, I want teleport that help the story, not ruin it.
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I don't remember the name of the module series, but there was one where an efreeti, Javul, was trying to turn himself into a god by granting wishes to his followers, which were using 2 out of 3 wishes to increase the power of the efretti. With how the wish spell is now, I really don't see that working.
(It's Legacy of Fire, by the way)
I don't see how that would be a problem, honestly. Wish still includes the "You may be able to accomplish something more than this but it's up to the GM" caveat, so given that Jhavhul is the one granting the wishes, he will probably still be able to work his wishcraft as he wants.
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The changes to how many languages one can speak will severely limit the power of Summons.
If I’m going to summon creatures, I generally want the four Elemental tongues, Celestial, and Sylvan.
The changes to how many languages one can speak will severely limit the power of Summons.
If I’m going to summon creatures, I generally want the four Elemental tongues, Celestial, and Sylvan.
I highly doubt that's a relevant example in APs or novels.
I highly doubt that's a relevant example in APs or novels.The changes to how many languages one can speak will severely limit the power of Summons.
If I’m going to summon creatures, I generally want the four Elemental tongues, Celestial, and Sylvan.
I don’t think I have any modules with summoners. There is one in Emerald Spire as I recall, how many languages is it given?
NPCs are seldom given a lot of languages, but here is a quick scan of the modules I own where an NPC is given four or more languages:
Pentosh: Ancient Osiriani, Common, Draconic, Osiriani, Necril
Aeteperax: Aklo, Common, Draconic, Grioth, Sylvan
Looks like in a couple of places an NPC would no longer be able to speak with some of their minions or give information they are expected to be able to.
How close are the Iconics to the novels and comics?
Lem: Common, Elven, Goblin, Halfling
Lini: Common, Druidic, Gnome, Goblin, Sylvan
Ezren: Abyssal, Celestial, Common, Draconic, Elven, Giant, Goblin, Ignan, Infernal, Kelish, Osiriani, Terran, Undercommon
I will also mention there are some real people who speak a dozen or more languages, hyperpolyglots.
Although the language rules in PF1 allowed for some characters to speak a ridiculous number of languages, the rules in Playtest would make it very difficult to build some real world people. I prefer fantasy rules to allow an exaggerated reality rather than be so restrictive that you have trouble building real people.
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A) You can learn two languages with one skill feat. Any of those characters could have that feat multiple times. And all characters get two languages out the gate, 3 if they have 14 intelligence. You can also use items to learn additional languages. There's nothing preventing learning lots of languages, even if they cost more. It is just a change in the build to get the same result. You might as well argue every Canon fighter can't exist anymore because their weapon training mechanics changed.
B) Monsters and NPCs don't follow PC build rules. They just get whatever languages they should know based on their role in the story.
A) You can learn two languages with one skill feat. Any of those characters could have that feat multiple times. And all characters get two languages out the gate, 3 if they have 14 intelligence. You can also use items to learn additional languages. There's nothing preventing learning lots of languages, even if they cost more. It is just a change in the build to get the same result. You might as well argue every Canon fighter can't exist anymore because their weapon training mechanics changed.
Fighters can still kill people. If you don’t know the right language, it can greatly complicate any friendly conversations. Diplomacy, Bluff, and even Intimidate are much less effective and it limits the PCs ability to understand clues.
Ezren is Core Iconic, PF1 at 7th is what I listed.
3 out of gate, so he would only need to spend 5 skill feats. Everyone would have 3 skill feats by 7th level, but by spending general feats it is possible. Do you think it should take that many resources?
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Considering this is a thread asking about stories that can't be told in the playtest - It doesn't really matter if something works at a different level than before or takes more resources if it can still be done.
For example, 17th level wizards can no longer cast Wish along with their other 9th level spells. This does not prevent stories involving the Wish spell, it just moves them to being something that needs a 20th level Wizard with a feat to perform. The story can still be told, even if the details around it changed.
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Considering this is a thread asking about stories that can't be told in the playtest - It doesn't really matter if something works at a different level than before or takes more resources if it can still be done.
For example, 17th level wizards can no longer cast Wish along with their other 9th level spells. This does not prevent stories involving the Wish spell, it just moves them to being something that needs a 20th level Wizard with a feat to perform. The story can still be told, even if the details around it changed.
This guy gets it. If you are talking about builds you are in the wrong thread. There are other threads to talk about builds.
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So, going ahead and saying that I haven't actually looked much into the playtest, largely due to the fact that my group is currently in the middle of a campaign, but I do think I have some to say, at least on the theory/design aspect of things, if not the specifics of the mechanics.
Everyone's great at Perception now by requirement, so you can't have oblivious guards or anyone else who is unaware of their surroundings. In PF1e if I wanted to do a stealth scenario, I made guards with a +1 Perception who take 10. Actual stealthy PCs autosucceed, and even Crag the Clunky needs about a 15 - and magical resources can be used to help the less able. In PF2e, every single PC has only about a 50/50 chance of sneaking, no matter the buffs, so for a 5 PC group it's 1 in 32 or so.
Sorry, but unless your guards are the same level as the party that's kinda bullcrap. You can still have guards with low enough Perception DCs to sneak by easily, you just need them to be lower level, which guards likely are.
Alternatively, "Oblivious" sounds like an awfully good reason to throw in a circumstance penalty...
The problem with this is that sneaking often (though admittedly not always) implies you're wanting to avoid a fight. Usually because the opponent is, if not outright dangerous, at least troublesome enough to make the PCs want to avoid fighting them entirely. While LG PCs wanting to sneak into the NG king's castle in order to grab some MacGuffin for the Greater Good would certainly have reason to sneak around low-level guards, the same cannot be said for those PCs trying to stealth their way into a LE tyrant's fortress, if you're simply relying on the guards being such low a level.
Of course, I'm sure there are ways to overcome this without much difficulty, but it would be nice to not need to handwave departures from the rules.
Keeping in mind that I don't like this answer:
Doesn't the NPCs-aren't-built-like-PCs feature of the playtest negate any assertion that a nth-level x can't do something anymore? Since, presumably, if they want an NPC to do it they'll just give them the ability to do it?
Seems like the only limitations the new ruleset technically puts are on the PC side of the narrative.
Oh dear... Are they actually doing this? Are NPCs/monsters now working distinctly differently from PCs? This is actually one of the biggest reasons I've been sticking to Pathfinder over both 4e and 5e, because I absolutely love the intercompatibility. NPCs, and to an extent even monsters*, can do anything a PC can do and vice versa, with only occasional exceptions. Like sure, even I'd give NPCs unique abilities the PCs could never have RAW access to, but it was very rare, and there was always some specific justification for it, like having used some offscreen ritual to absorb a metric ton of necrotic energy, or receiving a blessing from Desna.
It just added so much to the system's verisimilitude. Treating PCs differently from NPCs/monsters has always just felt... game-y to me. Of course, I realize I'm reading a lot of assumptions into two sentences, but if this is what's happening for 2e, I'm going from mildly excited to kind of scared... The ultimate point is that you can even take like a basilisk's stat block and fill out a PC character sheet with it. The fact that there was no fundamental mechanical bar preventing anyone or anything with six ability scores (or sometimes even five) from being played like a PC made it feel so much more like the players were a part of the world, even if, in practice, this rarely actually happened.
*In my experience, I've even found that most monsters can be made into PCs by treating their CR as being their starting level minus one (that is, a human with 3 levels in a PC class is a CR 2 creature, and so a CR 2 creature is roughly equivalent to a 3rd-level character). At least, outside of the hands of munchkins... It works far better than LA ever did, at the very least.
For the Teleport issue, maybe it’s time for a bit of WarCraft III(*) inspiration: Scroll of Town Portal. Classic style fast(*) Teleport would be way up your class tech tree if you have it at all, but it would be possible to use a lower level (slow) Teleport spell during down time to produce a magic item (Scroll fits best conceptually) that lets you Teleport quickly to a limited set of locations (that you would have had to prepare beforehand, in a way that is hard to conceal after the fact, using some ritual, or maybe even as part of casting the same spell in the process of making the magic item).
(snipped)
(*)No idea whether World of WarCraft continued with the same mechanic.
So I've actually been giving my parties what are basically hearthstones from WoW for pretty much this explicit purpose. That, and letting them be used as essentially magical walkie-talkies. They require a full-round action to use that provokes attacks of opportunity, so you don't want to use them in combat unless you have to, can only be used once per day, and can take you back to whatever single "hearth" you've attuned it to (and you can attune it to different "hearths" as you travel). A "hearth" being whatever semi-arbitrary place you feel is appropriate. I usually use taverns/inns, since that also provides some explanations for both the convenience of their location, and also an explanation that what makes a place a "hearth" is a ritual that requires daily upkeep, making it impractical at best for PCs to make whatever place they want into a "hearth". There's a handful of other rules on attuning them and stuff to make sure that players only use them as they are intended (like having there be no point in carrying multiple hearthstones, since in proximity they all become attuned - and therefore functionally identical - to each other), but that's the basic idea.
Of course, for campaigns that might require it, you can remove one or both features from it, but the walkie-talkie part helps justify the sort of semi-metagaming tabletalk I find every group indulges in on some level, so unless an adventure has a tone that would be specifically benefited by separated players being unable to communicate (like horror), it's a convenient handwave.
We have to agree to disagree here. To me, a complete change in how an important part of the heroes of Golarion look, fight, and feel is a major change to the canon. RPGs are about the characters.Character concepts are not Canon paizo stories.
(snipped)
PC builds aren't relevant to this thread, frankly.
I have to agree with Starfox, here. The first thing I do when looking at a system is consider what kinds of character concepts it can create. Not builds, note. Concepts. Essentially, the fluff of the character. In tabletop RPGs, there is a certain inextricability to how the two are linked, but ultimately, you can't make a wizard if you can't cast spells. Now, of course, it's unreasonable to expect every build in 1e to be replicable in 2e, even once it is fully released, but as far as I can tell, we're just talking about core classes, here, which I think is a pretty reasonable minimum standard to meet. Now, like I said, I haven't delved extensively into the 2e rules, but I have read through the classes (since, again, considering the types of character concepts I can make is one of my main draws to a new system), and I have to agree. The 2e paladin feels a lot more like a simple variation on the fighter than the cleric/fighter gish it's pretty much always been. A perfectly fine variation on the fighter, as has been said, but... yeah, the specific focus on heavy armour feels weird, for one. Paladins don't have faith in their armour, their faith is their armour. Aside from that, while I, personally, don't feel as strongly about Starfox concerning things like the shift from spells to powers, I can still acknowledge their concerns.
Now, my major concern for 2e's class design is... See, my golden standard for concept flexibility is the fact that Pathfinder allows for dynamic building of a rogue based around any of the six ability scores. Even just with the core book, you can make any stat your highest and still build a solid rogue concept around that stat (arguable exception to Constitution, but I'd still say there's things you can do with that). There is literally nothing stopping you from making your Pathfinder rogue's dump stat Dexterity. No, it's not going to be the most powerful rogue, but there's still things you can do that will utilize your good stat(s), whatever that happens to be. Make your 5e rogue's dump stat Dex, on the other hand, and unless you've got a high Int and are going for Arcane Trickster, you may as well be playing a commoner. Aside from saves, there is literally no benefit to giving a fighter more than 8 Intelligence. I mean, sure, that's always been the quintessential fighter dump stat, but in 3e/PF you can at least do things with that extra Int, and with some creativity and a few extra books, you can probably even make a pretty respectable build for a fighter whose Intelligence is one of their highest stats. From my browsing, while 2e doesn't appear to have hit 5e or even 4e's point... It does seem to be creeping uncomfortably close to each class having One Stat to Rule Them All. Of course, this is still playtest material, and it's only my first impressions.
I'd like to reiterate before I go, however, that we're not talking about builds, here. Yes, builds aren't unrelated to this conversation, but that's simply because builds are what facilitate character concepts. I'm not talking about the builds in and of themselves. I'm specifically talking about how the ways we can build characters impact the stories we can tell with those characters. I acknowledge that things like which spells are cast at which levels or how many languages a character can speak without extra investment, and even how many dice a certain thing has you roll are all pretty unimportant because, by and large, they are quantitative things. Numbers can always be fudged in one direction or another, so long as the essence of the plot holds. What I - and I believe you - have been talking about throughout this are qualitative changes, or when the quantities involved become so large that they do qualitatively alter the underlying story.
On the teleport balance issue, what teleport needs in not a long casting time - it is a long arrival time. Star Trek and its transporter often have this issue - people are starting to flicker into existence, but it takes a while for them to stabilize. This need not be a huge amount of time, say 1 minute, and the teleportees all spend their first turn after arriving orienting themselves to the exclusion of all other action. If you add the teleportation arrival making noise and smelling ozone, this would stop scry-and fry and make teleport more useful for escape than for attack.
This is also pretty much how I feel about teleport in terms of what its problems are. The original intention behind the teleport spell, from its inception in D&D, is to be a convenient way to travel, and as an emergency escape pod. The abuse of the spell is when it's used to ambush people. 2e's fix doesn't really do much for the latter (as Captain Morgan mentioned in their first response), and definitely upsets the former. I don't even know it necessarily needs to be a full minute, just a couple rounds of "summoning sickness" would probably be enough to dissuade the tactic. Making it noisy/flashy would also help in cases where the PCs are using it as part of their stealth tactics. Bonus points for all of this being pretty in keeping with the vast majority of teleportation magic in fiction.
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Sorry for double-posting, but ...frankly, there's something... unpleasant about some of your responses, that I just feel I have to point out.
First off, the title of this thread is simply "PF1 stories you can't quite tell in the playtest" which, combined with certain aspects of the OP that I'll get to in a second, reads to me as meaning more or less "stories one could tell in PF1 that significantly impacted by changes in PF2". But then a lot of your comments ask for people to cite what module or novel the things they're referring to occur in... Which, aside from a nebulous "A few APs I've read..." you never did in the OP. Or in any post since. Especially egregious when you don't seem to accept similar responses from others (i.e. The Archive's first post, which you didn't consider a "legitimate example" until they referenced a specific published adventure).
Your assertion that "The fact that you can't CLW wand spam in the playtest does not contradict canon." and the supporting statements after are perfectly reasonable for this discussion, I think, but in practice, you kind of seem to be bundling everything that is an aspect of player characters under that umbrella, and that it therefore doesn't apparently matter, but I'd argue that the players are the single most important aspect of telling stories in Pathfinder (or any tabletop game), and are therefore due at least some modicum of consideration. Sure, purely mechanical considerations like how many times an action can be performed in a round, or how much damage this or that ability does, and even things like spell levels being shuffled around don't substantively affect a given story - especially on the NPC side of things, since there's always behind-the-screen workarounds if you really need something to be done - but to use that to shut down all conversation about changes that affect the kinds of character concepts (here referring to the fluff and broad-stroke/iconic capabilities of a character) is a bit... despotic. I mean, imagine if the playtest had removed the monk's unarmed strike to instead focus them on the quarterstaff and other monk weapons. Would that not warrant discussion under the heading of "PF1 stories that you can't quite tell in the playtest"? Monks still exist, and they still get their flurry of blows, and slow fall, and other monk-y things, so it's not like the class is absent. But an aspect many would consider central to the story the monk class tells has been radically altered. If no adventure path had an unarmed martial NPC in it, would you say that discussing this change is irrelevant?
Now, you do seem to be okay with the diverging of PC and NPC/monster rules, which if that's the case, I suppose I can see a logic to your hardline rulings against any discussion of player characters. But we'd also be of fundamentally opposing opinions on how a tabletop RPG should work. Which is fine, in and of itself; it's not like I'm going to try and say that my opinion on this matter is the "objectively" right one or anything like that. But it does mean that there probably won't be any reconciliation between our viewpoints, so if that is the case, I would like to go ahead and get that matter out of the way.
P.S. Apologies for the absurd length of my previous post... ^^;
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There's a lot of text there for stuff I have already argued to death there and don't really feel like it's worth rehashing now.
I will say that I'm not really seeing how PF2 moves you more to "one true ability score." Yes, classes have a key ability score now, but there a lot of stuff going the other direction.
1) Weapon finesse is free, so anyone can potentially use dex based combat styles, while at the same time only rogues can get dex to damage so builds are going to also invest in other stats.
2) Casting stats no longer give bonus spell slots, so you aren't kneecapping yourself nearly as hard if you don't crank the stat.
3) Improved Channel Energy, Demoralize, and Resonance make Charisma way stronger, which in turn makes it easier to justify boosting it outside of Paladins/Bards/Sorcerers.
4) Ability boost mechanics make everyone focus on multiple stats. A PF1 character might get their key stat at 30+ while their secondary stats remained 14 and their dump stats a 7. PF2 characters instead have most or all of their stats increase as they progress and stay much closer to each other.
5) You can't dump your stats below 10 to further minmax your key stat.
6) Diminishing returns caps your key stat so that if you start with a 16 instead of an 18 you are only behind for half of the levels.
Within the playtest (and its updates) alone we have 3 different key ability scores for the Rogue, if you want to use your classic metric. But you could focus on the other stats with about the same results as PF1: a rogue with intelligence as their highest score would have the most skills trained (all of them, really) and sick knowledge and crafting. A rogue with top wisdom would have the best perception to be the ultimate trap spotter. The PF2 rogue can then leverage its many, many skill feats to squeeze the most from their stats, as opposed to the more set in stone rogue talents of PF1 that focused on "Rogue Skills" pretty exclusively. Plus having a high stat means you can snag multiclass feats. Getting respectable spellcasting without sacrificing rogue progression is a pretty awesome use of a high intelligence.
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Sorry for double-posting, but ...frankly, there's something... unpleasant about some of your responses, that I just feel I have to point out.
Well, I'm sorry if it was unpleasant to read. I will admit I was frustrated because the parameters of what I was asking for were being disregarded.
First off, the title of this thread is simply "PF1 stories you can't quite tell in the playtest" which, combined with certain aspects of the OP that I'll get to in a second, reads to me as meaning more or less "stories one could tell in PF1 that significantly impacted by changes in PF2". But then a lot of your comments ask for people to cite what module or novel the things they're referring to occur in...
This is the standard I established in the opening post. This isn't a bait and switch and my part. "The stories Paizo actually writes" was always meant to be the focus of the thread. I feel I may not have conveyed this as clearly as I should have, but that was certainly my intent.
Which, aside from a nebulous "A few APs I've read..." you never did in the OP. Or in any post since. Especially egregious when you don't seem to accept similar responses from others (i.e. The Archive's first post, which you didn't consider a "legitimate example" until they referenced a specific published adventure).
That's because nobody asked me too. I didn't go name dropping APs because I don't want to spoil them for people who haven't read them. That's also why I didn't ask, for example, Ssalarn to name which Pathfinder Tale novel has an alchemist explicitly stealing spells from a wizard's spellbook. Had The Archive failed to name the module they were referencing, I would have taken it at their word that it existed.
Your assertion that "The fact that you can't CLW wand spam in the playtest does not contradict canon." and the supporting statements after are perfectly reasonable for this discussion, I think, but in practice, you kind of seem to be bundling everything that is an aspect of player characters under that umbrella, and that it therefore doesn't apparently matter, but I'd argue that the players are the single most important aspect of telling stories in Pathfinder (or any tabletop game), and are therefore due at least some modicum of consideration.
Player characters have been considered all over the place. I myself have made tons of threads considering player characters, and lots of other people have too. I think it is fair to ask for a discussion where we focus on non-player character aspects, because that is a core component of Golarion as a setting. It may not the be most important part of the game, but it is a distinct thing from player characters.
but to use that to shut down all conversation about changes that affect the kinds of character concepts (here referring to the fluff and broad-stroke/iconic capabilities of a character) is a bit... despotic.
I suppose it is. But I'd like to try and illustrate my perspective here. Imagine we were a cuisine forum and there have been a lot of discussions raging on about meat dishes lately. Many of them have become quite heated and involve a level of disagreement over the merits of different meats product that is exhausting.
So I made a thread to talk about vegetarian dishes. I am not shutting down other threads that talk about meat. I'm simply trying to make one that isn't about meat and focuses on some real issues I see with vegetarian options. I try to be as clear on this point as I can be in the opening post.
... And then a bunch of folk start posting about meat anyway. This is frustrating. I think it is reasonable to ask for a space to discuss a particular subject matter to the exclusion of others, if those other subject matters also have their space for discussion. That's why the forums are divided by topic, after all. It would be gauche of me to begin posting threads about PF2 on the Starfinder forums, for example.
I mean, imagine if the playtest had removed the monk's unarmed strike to instead focus them on the quarterstaff and other monk weapons. Would that not warrant discussion under the heading of "PF1 stories that you can't quite tell in the playtest"? Monks still exist, and they still get their flurry of blows, and slow fall, and other monk-y things, so it's not like the class is absent. But an aspect many would consider central to the story the monk class tells has been radically altered. If no adventure path had an unarmed martial NPC in it, would you say that discussing this change is irrelevant?
Honestly? Probably, for purposes of this thread. Let's assume there is an NPC monk in a Paizo adventure path whose story is inexorably intertwined with his ability to punch things. (That's the bar here, but we will take this for granted.) Provided we can model a character who is good at punching things, it doesn't actually matter if his class is "monk." He could even be trained in a monastery but not be of the monk class. You could outright remove the monk class from the game and it wouldn't really matter. What really matters is if you can make a character who is good enough at punching to complete their role in the story as previously written.
Again, the conversation about how monks should punch is fine and worth having and impacts the stories we tell at our table when we play monks, but that is distinct from the stories Paizo publishes. And therefore, outside the bounds I hope to set for this discussion.
Now, you do seem to be okay with the diverging of PC and NPC/monster rules, which if that's the case, I suppose I can see a logic to your hardline rulings against any discussion of player characters. But we'd also be of fundamentally opposing opinions on how a tabletop RPG should work. Which is fine, in and of itself; it's not like I'm going to try and say that my opinion on this matter is the "objectively" right one or anything like that. But it does mean that there probably won't be any reconciliation between our viewpoints, so if that is the case, I would like to go ahead and get that matter out of the way.
Indeed, you are correct here. And I agree there probably won't be reconciliation. This was the lion's share of the "stuff I have already argued to death there and don't really feel like it's worth rehashing now" I alluded to in my previous post.
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I will say that I'm not really seeing how PF2 moves you more to "one true ability score." Yes, classes have a key ability score now, but there a lot of stuff going the other direction.
(snipped)
Well, I did at least mean to imply that I was probably being a bit overly sensitive to things I was seeing that seemed to suggest this sort of direction, considering how strongly I feel about it. Apologies if that didn't come across, and I'm certainly heartened to hear that it doesn't seem to be doing that on closer inspection.
Honestly? Probably, for purposes of this thread. Let's assume there is an NPC monk in a Paizo adventure path whose story is inexorably intertwined with his ability to punch things. (That's the bar here, but we will take this for granted.) Provided we can model a character who is good at punching things, it doesn't actually matter if his class is "monk." He could even be trained in a monastery but not be of the monk class. You could outright remove the monk class from the game and it wouldn't really matter. What really matters is if you can make a character who is good enough at punching to complete their role in the story as previously written.
This is the only bit of the rest I'm going to respond to since, for the rest, anything left that I do disagree with you on is pretty much covered by the aforementioned difference of opinion, and to try and address any of it would be tantamount to sparking a flamewar, which I certainly don't want to do. I was hesitant enough just to make the previous post for that exact fear, but I felt it was a point that was better mentioned openly rather than leave unsaid and let fester.
Anywho...
I just want to clarify a bit that... I'm not too terribly bothered about what class is called what or anything like that. In fact, I'm kind of notorious among my IRL tabletop RPG community for being almost dismissive of established class fluff. Like I've once used the spirit summoner archetype to make a character whose playing of a zither is so beautiful she can enchant surrounding water (nonmagically, she's just that good a musician - because fantasy world, it doesn't have to be 100% logical) into "dancing" for her, resulting in what is, mechanically, her eidolon. A few minor tweaks - her playing of the zither counting as her somatic and verbal spell components, for example - and there she is. The edge cases where I do have to break from the concept to satisfy rules (like how her "nonmagical" effects are countered by antimagic field, for example) are generally infrequent enough that I'm content to overlook the narrative inconsistencies when they're encountered (plus it would be completely broken not to). This is pretty much because I tend to come up with a character idea first, and then look around at what class and other mechanics can be used (arguably, misused) to mechanically represent that idea. This is, in short, why I disliked the original 3e sorcerer because there were very few concepts it could fulfill that couldn't also be created with the wizard. Pathfinder's bloodlines give it enough uniqueness to stand apart. For example, another character I made who was a tinkerer. Spells were little one-use gadgets he threw together on the fly and bloodline powers were more robust, multi-use contraptions he built. Otherwise, pretty much just used the standard sorcerer class as-is.
Anyway, point being that I'm not so worried about what any particular class is capable of so much as wanting to be sure that someone is capable of filling in that niche. Which is why I backed up Starfox's concerns. The loss of a quintessential character type is concerning from that perspective. Of course, not really trying to sway any opinions here, all of this is just trying to help you understand our perspective. Like with pointing out why many respondents have mistaken the generic descriptions of the OP to mean the thread was intended to talk about the potentiality of stories to be told in each edition, not simply the officially published ones that have already been told. Not trying to persuade you to listen to these comments, simply trying to help you understand why they are being voiced in this thread.
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Anyway, point being that I'm not so worried about what any particular class is capable of so much as wanting to be sure that someone is capable of filling in that niche. Which is why I backed up Starfox's concerns. The loss of a quintessential character type is concerning from that perspective. Of course, not really trying to sway any opinions here, all of this is just trying to help you understand our perspective. Like with pointing out why many respondents have mistaken the generic descriptions of the OP to mean the thread was intended to talk about the potentiality of stories to be told in each edition, not simply the officially published ones that have already been told. Not trying to persuade you to listen to these comments, simply trying to help you understand why they are being voiced in this thread.
I believe I understand the stance, yes. Although to be honest I'm not entirely sure you and Starfox have quite as much common ground as you allude to here. Starfox seems very hung up indeed on the names of classes. Reread their post below: they specifically want the playtest version of the Paladin renamed and new hypothetical version that matches their own vision to be given the title instead.
They also acknowledge that you could probably convert their vision of a PF1 paladin into a cleric/fighter multiclass, which further indicates that it is not merely a matter of a character functioning the same. It is this class functioning the same.
What I also didn't point out at the time, because it felt off topic, is that while the post calls for a cavalier like implementation of the paladin, literally any class can get a Cavalier implementation now with the archetype. We do, in fact, have a Challenge mechanic in the game currently that one could take on a paladin, cleric, fighter, or what have you. I don't think said Challenge is very good, mind you, but I really don't think Challenge being weaker qualifies for changing the stories you could tell. That is just straight mechanics anyway you slice it. (We also now have extended Blade of Justice and Smite Evil, both of which function in a pretty similar manner to Challenge.)
I guess the point this illustrates (to me, at least) is that there are a looooot of differing views on what the game SHOULD represent. So much so so that you can think you agree with someone and then realize you have drastically different desires. And these are largely subjective. The reason I tried to focus the thread on published Paizo stories is because that is the closest thing to an objective definition of what the game actually has represented. Limiting the conversation to this creates a common ground that we can all reference.
The Paladin might mean something different to Starfox than me, and it might mean something else entirely to you, but if we look at the canon of Golarion we can see what it represented to the people actually making the game at that time and if it can be done under the people writing the game now. That is fundamentally easier to discuss.
This is not just the loss of a concept, it also makes the arsenal of martial combat choices more limited. The paladin and cavalier shared a very similar mechanic, that was distinctly different from the barbarian, fighter, and ranger. Like a barbarian, they could use any weapon but had a time limit, but the implementation was very different and interesting in its own way. There is no playtest equivalent.
I guess the designers could not figure an interesting implementation of smite/challenge in PF2, which makes me a sad puppy.
I think the playtest paladin is an interesting class mechanically. But it is not a paladin. Rename it champion or bodyguard or somesuch and give us a true-to-role paladin reboot in a later book. Or publish a cavalier reboot, and make Paladin an archetype you can apply to fighter, bodyguard, or cavalier. Anything that allows us to re-create a PF1 paladin.
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That's fair. In retrospect, I think I did end up projecting some of my own concerns onto Starfox's comments.
At this point, I think anything else I might have to say would be veering dangerously close to a complete derailing of the thread, even beyond the discussion of PCs. So I'll just leave it at that.