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Of course there are fights where a certain class ends up making a minimal contribution (bards/enchanters vs undead or constructs)
This is no longer true. Undead now have no resistance to mind affecting magic. One of my favorite changes in the playtest.
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Of course there are fights where a certain class ends up making a minimal contribution (bards/enchanters vs undead or constructs)This is no longer true. Undead now have no resistance to mind affecting magic. One of my favorite changes in the playtest.
I am also a really big fan of that change, and that they are no longer immune against fear, since that opens up more story options. It is also one my favorite parts of the new edition.
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Let's say you are trying to infiltrate a party to get information. Some characters might sneak in. Others may bluff their way in. Others may need a distraction to climb the fence. Perhaps the caster has a spell for this situation? Maybe a character could use Diplomacy before the party to get an invitation? Someone could lure a guard out, knock him out, and steal his uniform.
Regardless, everyone doesn't have to follow the same plan.
The problem with different people using different methods is simple: It splits the party, which tends to get people killed. It's why I stopped taking Stealth after a while in PF1e, after I came within an inch of losing my Rogue because one person cannot handle stumbling into a level-appropriate encounter during a solo mission.
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....that does not sound playtest related.
Hey... You asked.
Besides, it's related to the changes I want to see in the game. That includes the way Paizo supports and expands the game.
(Although, in hindsight I had already posted here... My mistake. I thought the previous post was in a different thread. Well... Not all bad. There was a typo in the last sentence that changed what I meant almost completely)?
The problem with different people using different methods is simple: It splits the party, which tends to get people killed. It's why I stopped taking Stealth after a while in PF1e, after I came within an inch of losing my Rogue because one person cannot handle stumbling into a level-appropriate encounter during a solo mission.Let's say you are trying to infiltrate a party to get information. Some characters might sneak in. Others may bluff their way in. Others may need a distraction to climb the fence. Perhaps the caster has a spell for this situation? Maybe a character could use Diplomacy before the party to get an invitation? Someone could lure a guard out, knock him out, and steal his uniform.
Regardless, everyone doesn't have to follow the same plan.
Moreover, splitting the party often isn't permitted for OOC reasons, since it slows down the game a lot and puts double the strain on the GM as they have to basically run two games simultaneously. It only really works when the separation is fleeting, like when a rogue scouts a single room ahead.
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I am neutral to positive on the changes
Resonance I am not surprised to see gone...I felt every iteration or attempt at fixing it solved one problem, while producing a problem somewhere else. Elements I like, and I would still rather see a resonance system basically be used to control for charges or something, but it going away I think will be fine.
Loss of Level for untrained I am mixed on. It does solve some weirdness, but hopefully it won't return the game to a situation where some folks are autofail and some folks are autosuceed. I think Paizo doesn't want to go back to this, so I suspect there will be something built into the proficiency ranks to prevent this from happening. Something like Master prof allowing a character to allow another character to roll as if they were trained, or Legendary allowing the same but for the entire group.
Magic needs to be improved a bit, especially some things like durations. I always figured they intentionally went with the most extreme version to see how it went with folks. As long as Magic is kept toned down from PF1 it should be fine.
I had a feeling that some spells were too weak, but I hope skill feats get buffed similarly as well, as many felt too minuscule to really matter.
And to be honest, I like the new proficiency changes. Sure it leads to stealth gating and stuff, but I feel that solving that problem is impossible without sacrificing the feeling of competence in specializing in that field unless you add some group checks or through strategic splitting stuff.
Moderate nitpick. Different methods and party splitting works fine. In some games. Play a game of Shadowrun and no one bats an eye when the Decker sits in the security booth, the face schmoozes with some guards, and the two weapon guys infiltrate the facility. However for the reasons you mentioned that stuff doesn't fly in D20. Different paradigms for different games, and d20's paradigm is distinctly summed up with the Never Split the Party song.The problem with different people using different methods is simple: It splits the party, which tends to get people killed. It's why I stopped taking Stealth after a while in PF1e, after I came within an inch of losing my Rogue because one person cannot handle stumbling into a level-appropriate encounter during a solo mission.Let's say you are trying to infiltrate a party to get information. Some characters might sneak in. Others may bluff their way in. Others may need a distraction to climb the fence. Perhaps the caster has a spell for this situation? Maybe a character could use Diplomacy before the party to get an invitation? Someone could lure a guard out, knock him out, and steal his uniform.
Regardless, everyone doesn't have to follow the same plan.
Fundamentally, though a scene in which some players cannot participate because their characters are not physically present, is simply less fun than a scene in which all players can participate.
So I assiduously avoid splitting the party for that reason. I mean, if we're going to do stuff that only involves some subset of the group, why bother going through the trouble to schedule times when everyone can get together.
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Why does "using different skill checks" mean "splitting the party"?
Imagine the above scenario:
The Paladin uses Diplomacy to convince a noble to vouch for him. he walks through the main gate.
The Bard uses Bluff to convince the guard that he left his invitation at home and the guard let's him walk through the front gate.
The Rogue uses Stealth to sneak through the front gate while the Bard is...
Because each of those rolls is probably going to involve about 3-5 minute scenes of narration, improv, and roleplaying (which is inherently more fun if everyone can be in the scene.) So 3-4 people are going to have to sit on their hands while the Paladin tries diplomacy, then rotating who doesn't get to participate for the rest of the party, and then 25 minutes later we get to where we would have gotten if everybody was in on the same plan instead of going it alone.
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(which is inherently more fun if everyone can be in the scene.)
You keep using this phrase. You are wrong.
Now, obviously, your are *right* with regard to your own experience. But I'll claim that this would be true only through failure to achieve the best possible experience.In my games the spotlight moves around very frequently.
It is true that the peak of *in the moment* fun for each player generally occurs during the time in the spotlight. So everyone else is not at that peak when the spotlight is on them. Thus, so far, we are together.
But there are other factors to consider.
One, I am completely fixated on story-telling. When you are at a theater watching a movie, it is *never* your turn. And yet you can have a lot of fun. At my table, I try to make it constantly true that every player is deeply engaged in the story, and also finds that the outcome of the character in the spotlight to have important immediate consequences for all of the characters. So not only are they having fun enjoying the story, they have personal "skin in the game" which goes beyond the movie-watching experience. It is my job to make this fun for everyone.
Second, when they are *the one* in the spotlight, that is more fun for that one person than when it is a group event.
Third, there remains a lot of time when it is still a fun group activity. This is probably still a good 50% of the time itself.
So "total fun" = 50% standard group fun (Call it 1X) + 12% spotlight fun (2x) + 38% engaged second hand fun (0.9X). The total comes out to more than 100%.
Obviously I just pulled number out of the air to make a point. But I assure you that for my group the rotation of spotlight is a huge bonus. If anything, my math above fails to stress it well enough.
I don't reject your position for your group. But I completely reject your proclamation of truth as simply being myopic. A great game must include a focus of great group teamwork dynamic fun. So I fully agree that it needs to deliver what you are asking for. But the items you are trying to push off the table are lost to the detriment on the overall value of the game.
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I can understand Resonance being a deal breaker for people since the whole magic item system was balanced around it, but is bulk and rarity really what's stopping you from buying the game? Two things that could be house ruled out in 5 minutes?
2- Resonance: I'll happily do a jig on it's grave. Now if we can just dig 2 more shallow graves for bulk and rarity I might think about buying the new game when it comes out.
I'm really not sure how you house rule bulk in 5 minutes, except to eliminate it and replace it with nothing. Replacing it with something else is a big endeavor.
Bulk is a huge step backwards. It's horribly imprecise, breaks any real world connection to the values (making estimation of a thing without a value far harder), and is fundamentally badly designed in ways that quickly lead to absolutely nonsensical outcomes that just defy all reason.
Weight based encumbrance isn't perfect at all, but it doesn't give me completely inane outcomes where one 100 pound dead weight is vastly harder to carry than another 100 pound dead weight because reasons, while also telling me I need to come up with an arbitrary limit on my own for how many shortswords a horse can carry as by RAW that number is somewhere between "who knows?" and "infinity".
This is not an obscure edge case where the system can be forgiven for not handling it well. "We stick loot on a transport animal" is kind of a fairly common thing to do. Just how easily bulk flat out breaks under that should be a red flag for it not working properly.
That said, if everything else is great and we're stuck with bulk? That's not a deal breaker on its own. But it's a big in the negative column. I prefer a system where I don't have to immediately houserule stuff out of the box. That's why I stopped DMing 3.5: most of my houserules were things Paizo fixed in PF for me. I'd be happy if they don't go out and break new stuff now.
(Rarity though? That's awesome and I hope they keep it.)
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The wizard casts demensional door...
This entire scenario doesn’t happen in PF1, because the Wizard is bringing the whole party with them.
When one character has the much easier path for doing something, that is usually how the whole party accomplishes a task in PF1. If it only works for 1 character, it almost never happens because it usually results in a split party and players are excessively cautious not to do that.
It would be awesome to see more group challenges written into adventures in PF2, but I suspect it will be at the adventure level and not the core rulebook level.
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Whether conscious or not, it’s less ugly than prudent - bid low and settle in the middle. Overall though, the changes have shifted things back towards the center in several areas, which is what one might hope to expect from a collective and commercially viable endeavor.I also have an ugly suspicion the made magic in the playtest this weak intentionally to see how big an outrage it would create - they can't really have failed to see how low save DCs were. I know suspecting a company of deliberately ruining their own product is stupid, but I find it somewhat hard to believe magic from the playtest was ever intended to float.
I kind of wonder if there was also a certain amount of "be careful what you ask for" in it. People kept telling them that magic is too powerful and martials are too weak in comparison. So they brought out the nuclear nerfstrike and hit magic from every direction, even magic items. EVERYTHING magic was weakened except for magic weapons, which are now required deathsticks.
Now we see what a game with a lot of the magic sucked out of it looks like, to the point that even the casters feel more like hybrid classes than they do pure casters. Suddenly, "nerf the hell out of magic" doesn't sound quite so great.
Or maybe they really thought this was a good idea, I don't know. Whatever it was, I'm glad it's being changed.
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Because each of those rolls is probably going to involve about 3-5 minute scenes of narration, improv, and roleplaying
yay! god forbid there's actual roleplaying in my roleplaying game
....that does not sound playtest related.
Well, nothing in this thread is playtest related as none of the changes we're talking about are in a playtest document or are going to see a playtest by the public. ;)
(Rarity though? That's awesome and I hope...
Rarity can work if that settle on only one thing it tracks: is it actual rarity, power or narrative ability? It borders on useless if it continues to straddle all three. So I don't hate the idea of rarity, I just really, really hate the current way it's used.
Though a good fix would be to use keywords and then use the rarity system on those keywords, so you can explain why it's using the rarity system under the keyword description.
