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Curious if anyone will be doing the same.
Going to be adding and removing traditions from certain spells, finger of death not being arcane and implosion not being divine are two that come to mind while typing this, but there are quite a few more I will possibly change.
I will also most likely change the durations to around what they would have been for a caster of the minimum level needed to cast that spell in 1e, but will play with RAW to begin with to see if it really makes a difference.
I also really don't like the heightened spell system, but I think if I just have everything auto-heighten like cantrips it will: 1) make casters far too OP and back to the exponential Wizard problem 2) Kill one of the sorcerers abilities making it pointless.
I know it's early at this point and more data will be needed, but just some off the cuff things that have been rattling in my brain since I got my copy of the CRB. CP for your thoughts?
Curious if anyone will be doing the same.
Going to be adding and removing traditions from certain spells, finger of death not being arcane and implosion not being divine are two that come to mind while typing this, but there are quite a few more I will possibly change.
I will also most likely change the durations to around what they would have been for a caster of the minimum level needed to cast that spell in 1e, but will play with RAW to begin with to see if it really makes a difference.
I also really don't like the heightened spell system, but I think if I just have everything auto-heighten like cantrips it will: 1) make casters far too OP and back to the exponential Wizard problem 2) Kill one of the sorcerers abilities making it pointless.
I know it's early at this point and more data will be needed, but just some off the cuff things that have been rattling in my brain since I got my copy of the CRB. CP for your thoughts?
The greatest idea I had was to separate bonuses. Circumstance bonuses are provided by martial characters and the like. Then you have Arcane Bonus, Divine Bonus, Occult Bonus, and Primal Bonus. These stack with each other, but not itself. So you can have a variety of buffs from a variety of sources.
Given the math though, I think that would ruin any semblance of balance, so I never took it any further than 'Gee it would be nice if Bless and Bardic Music weren't the exact same bonus.' and what not.
It really bones parties with more than one support caster.
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I think you're misreading that. Kasoh's suggestion is a houserule they're considering to split bonus types by tradition.
Sherlock is echoing the sentiment by saying that in the game as is having multiple support characters is difficult because there are so few bonus types.
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Personally I will play two full 1-20 campaigns before I decide to change anything from RAW when it comes to this. Just to see how it works out in play.
(also, shouldn't this be in the houserules forum?)
(Disclaimer, still bookless)
A House rule on Duration that I implemented for a homebrew during the PT was that the duration had a level scaling effect, albeit minor. The reaction was favorable from my dedicated Caster.
NewDuration = OldDuration + (OldDuration/10*Level)
So, for a 10th level party, with a 1 minute duration effect, the result is:
2 Minutes = 1 Minute + [( (1 Minute/10 = 1 Round) * 10th Level) = 1 Minute]
Example 2:
1 5th level party casting a spell with a listed duration of 10 minutes
15 Minutes = 10 Minutes + (10/10 minute * 5th Level)
15 Minutes = 10 Minutes + (1 Minute * 5)
Realistically, I'm still likely to be running 1E almost exclusively for at least another decade, but, have been watching 2E closely, and likely will be delicate with my initial approach.
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Another, potential, slightly less delicate option that I have NOT used, would be to give all spells with a duration the following:
(Heighten +1, increase the duration by a factor of 10. Duration increases do not stack regardless of source.) This preserves rule-space for Extend Spell, which I don't think I've heard making it in to 2e yet.
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Brainstorming Extend Spell options more....
Duration is increased by 1 unit.
Duration is increased rounds equal to your level.
Duration is doubled.
Duration is multiplied by your level.
Duration is multiplied by 10.
Cost: 1 Action
Cost: Heighten +1
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I agree with Baby Samurai on this. Some of the things that you're trying to correct here I think are benefits of the Second Edition system rather than flaws.
Shorter duration spells are good. They're clearly defined to be used in combat. Rather than working to extend those spells I would much rather things be reproduced either through the use of Magic Items or through the use of a Ritual.
Elimination of the multiple bonuses to prevent too much overlap was a great improvement since it tightened the math by a lot and prevented a full group of support characters from blowing checks out of the water.
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Shortening spells can really, really go too far. Combats are fast and brutal, but that's not all spells are for. If a spell is measured in rounds that will often mean it's unusable in non-combat, exploratory, or puzzle solving tasks.
Flying around the area to scout is cool, but if you only have one minute of flight you're better off just hoofing it, for example.
From what I've heard the spell durations largely make sense, and super strong combat buffs are the only ones that are very short. I still need to get my book before I make a final call, but I can easily see myself extending or even shortening spell durations to suit the kinds of game I want to run.
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Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
Battles rarely last for more than 1 minute, so it does all of that in combat at a 1 minute duration, but means you are more likely to split the party or run into problems if you try to use it out of combat since it'll wear off. It's a de-facto "only usable in combat" restriction which makes me retch.
If you give it a 5 minute duration, you're unlikely to see it used across multiple battles, since it takes a few minutes to loot corpses and move to the next area, but it does allow you to use it out of combat for cool things.
I would slap a rarity flag on it, since it's overly strong in combat and can affect certain games, but beyond that a 5 minute Fly sounds much better to me.
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Just realized that this should really be in the homebrew forum. I think the baseline durations are better for more people, but my games are definitely going to get tweaked.
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It really bones parties with more than one support caster.Curious if anyone will be doing the same.
Going to be adding and removing traditions from certain spells, finger of death not being arcane and implosion not being divine are two that come to mind while typing this, but there are quite a few more I will possibly change.
I will also most likely change the durations to around what they would have been for a caster of the minimum level needed to cast that spell in 1e, but will play with RAW to begin with to see if it really makes a difference.
I also really don't like the heightened spell system, but I think if I just have everything auto-heighten like cantrips it will: 1) make casters far too OP and back to the exponential Wizard problem 2) Kill one of the sorcerers abilities making it pointless.
I know it's early at this point and more data will be needed, but just some off the cuff things that have been rattling in my brain since I got my copy of the CRB. CP for your thoughts?
The greatest idea I had was to separate bonuses. Circumstance bonuses are provided by martial characters and the like. Then you have Arcane Bonus, Divine Bonus, Occult Bonus, and Primal Bonus. These stack with each other, but not itself. So you can have a variety of buffs from a variety of sources.
Given the math though, I think that would ruin any semblance of balance, so I never took it any further than 'Gee it would be nice if Bless and Bardic Music weren't the exact same bonus.' and what not.
Does it? Or is it possible to have more valid combinations of parties now that one support caster can provide the bonus and the other can provide something else? And reduces the need to have specific classes because more classes can fill similar roles?
(Honest questions, my CRB is supposed to be delivered today so I haven't had a chance to read anything.)
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The duration on spells like Fly seem to be fairly balanced at the current duration. While there is a note mentioning that it's not recommended to use it out of combat for things like exploration it could still be used for challenges such as getting over or around obstacles or bypassing things that would otherwise be impossible without flight.
That would be more of a GM call but the idea is that if it would take longer than 10 minutes they should really be looking at other options.
If you want to homebrew a longer duration for certain spells in your games though that's all you!
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If you give it a 5 minute duration, you're unlikely to see it used across multiple battles, since it takes a few minutes to loot corpses and move to the next area, but it does allow you to use it out of combat for cool things.I would slap a rarity flag on it, since it's overly strong in combat and can affect certain games, but beyond that a 5 minute Fly sounds much better to me.
Must have sounded better to the designers as well. 2E's fly has a 5 minute duration. (Also still common.)
Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
Flight leaves you open to ranged attacks and easily spotted if not also invisible. It's hardly 'super strong'.
Must have sounded better to the designers as well. 2E's fly has a 5 minute duration. (Also still common.)
If you give it a 5 minute duration, you're unlikely to see it used across multiple battles, since it takes a few minutes to loot corpses and move to the next area, but it does allow you to use it out of combat for cool things.I would slap a rarity flag on it, since it's overly strong in combat and can affect certain games, but beyond that a 5 minute Fly sounds much better to me.
I absolutely cannot wait to read the actual book and stop speculating XD
Flight leaves you open to ranged attacks and easily spotted if not also invisible. It's hardly 'super strong'.Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
This is a really strange retort, but by this logic flight also makes it so you no longer leave tracks while moving. You also have the high-ground on any target you encounter.
Realistically though the ability to fly does offer a ton of additional versatility when it comes to traversing terrain while exploring.
Flight leaves you open to ranged attacks and easily spotted if not also invisible. It's hardly 'super strong'.Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
Lots of PF enemies lack ranged attacks, including some high level ones. It's super strong, the equivalent of Repulsion without a save if you don't have a ceiling constraining you.
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I think you're misreading that. Kasoh's suggestion is a houserule they're considering to split bonus types by tradition.
Sherlock is echoing the sentiment by saying that in the game as is having multiple support characters is difficult because there are so few bonus types.
Yeah, this was my meaning. All magic bonuses being the same type means that if you have two casters that can increase your chance to do sonething, you'll only ever benefit from one of them. Its far from uncommon to have both a cleric and a bard, for example.
At the very least, giving each arcane tradition a separate bonus type alleviates the problem, though a party with a cleric and a divine sorceror would still have this issue.
Or, have e.g. morale, insight, and competence bonuses, and have spells from each tradition use a mix of the three, careful to avoid excessive overlap at the same spell level. You then still have fewer bonus types, but now casters can work together because it's not just a single bonus type.
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Multiple bonus types was one of the things that in my opinion caused excessive imbalance in D&D 3rd Edition / 3.5 / Pathfinder First Edition.
I would very much prefer that it did not come back.
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Lots of PF enemies lack ranged attacks, including some high level ones. It's super strong, the equivalent of Repulsion without a save if you don't have a ceiling constraining you.Flight leaves you open to ranged attacks and easily spotted if not also invisible. It's hardly 'super strong'.Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
Only strong if your encounters are designed to consist of flightless pure melee foes in open spaces.
I can't recall the last time I ran an encounter where the enemies weren't either capable of flight or had good ranged attackers, except for some tunnel fighting encounters where there wasn't room to fly off anyway.
If flight is ruining your encounters, you need to design them better, because they wouldn't be very good without flight either.
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Just have the casters, you know, talk to each other and make sure they prepare a good mix of spells.
One side can buff to hits, other can buff AC or damage. Or they can each taken one buffing and one damage spell instead of both filling their slots with only buffs.
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Odd that you mention flight as an exception. Long duration flight breaks encounters and trivializes exploration.
Its one the strongest 'super strong' combat buffs in the game, on top of everything else it does. Its effective immunity against a giant pile of monsters, traps and hazards, and lends itself to splitting the party. It needs to be short duration and fairly high level.
I probably haven't played PF1 as much as many of you, but in my limited experience I don't remember flight ever breaking the game, per se. This because enemies almost always had ranged weapons, and fliers were rarely also invisible.
That being said, the build I saw that was most horribly broken in PF1 (and sucked all the fun out of it for the entire party, btw) was the cavalier on a flying mount. "Well let me just one-shot everything while the rest of the party watches stupidly". Yay, so much fun I could just take a nap. God I hope that never becomes a possible thing in PF2...
You are fortunate, every gamr I have run or played in has had 2+ people getting either perma flight and greater invis or very regular use of both.
But yeah the less game breaking cheese the better. PF1e was a nice step away from 3.5 madness for me, hopefully 2e is continuing that trend.
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I also really don't like the heightened spell system, but I think if I just have everything auto-heighten like cantrips it will: 1) make casters far too OP and back to the exponential Wizard problem 2) Kill one of the sorcerers abilities making it pointless.I think it makes a lot more sense than having separate spells at different levels that essentially do the same thing better, e.g. Invis vs Heightened Invis in PF1.
Is your objection that you now have to actually use a higher-level slot to get the additional effects for a spell, rather than having it just automatically improve while still occupying a lower-level slot? Not having played yet, I'm thinking it should add a lot of balance to the game if casters need to pick and choose what spells they put in their higher level slots, and leave less-powerful (maybe utility) spells in their lower slots as they level. To me there it seems reasonable that a 1st level spell should be much less powerful than a 7th level one if it is not occupying a 7th level slot.
Yes that is my objection at it's core I guess. It simply felt clunky in the playtest when choosing spells and doing the higher level sections of it anyone playing a caster was quite underwhelmed and dissatisfied with the spells in general(even with the damage buffs for some spells used near the end of the playtest).
I would like to say I do love a lot of what has been done and am enjoying the new rules quite a bit. Maybe it's just my knee jerk to these rules being cemented in the final product and more time and gaming will tell. As I said it's just been rattling around in my head since I got the CRB and was curious as to what everyone thinks.
Still wondering what everyone thinks about the odd shuffling of spells to different lists/traditions. Maybe it's was just some old school impluse by the devs as one of my examples 'finger of death' was a druid spell back in the AD&D days. Maybe I just got used to it being on the wizard/sorcerer list and it's an attempt to make them feel unique to a certain type of caster again.
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Multiple bonus types was one of the things that in my opinion caused excessive imbalance in D&D 3rd Edition / 3.5 / Pathfinder First Edition.
I would very much prefer that it did not come back.
Multiple bonus types was one of the things that made it enjoyable. Getting rid of numeric stacking ruins much of the fun.
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I have a feeling that they tightened these sorts of spells and effects down a great deal for the Playtest, then loosened up the ones where it was merited for the actual 2nd edition rules. They've aimed to limit them so they won't be game-breaking; and it's much easier for us as GMs to loosen up one of these spells/abilities even further if we want to, than it would be to restrict something from how it's written in the rules.
I remember when Paizo published the Age of Worms adventure path in Dungeon Magazine, and the L11-12 chapter "A Gathering of Winds" included a vertical dungeon that basically made the assumption, all parties of level 11 characters should be able to fly/air-walk for extended periods. Prior to that, I and the players in my group would never have expected that - afterward, it seemed like it became a baseline expectation.
And really, there were a lot of things in the early Paizo adventures that worked that way. Actually, James Jacobs wrote an adventure even before that for 17th level characters (The Thunder Below) that provided an amazing tutorial of the effects of divination spells on an investigation (you can probably still find it as a free adventure on WotC's site - it was one of my favorite high level adventures from the 3.5 era). And messageboards contributed too - how many of us learned about Scry and Fry here on the Paizo boards?
But after a while, those exploits changed the way the game felt, and deeply altered the stories that we ended up telling. 3.5 and Pathfinder 1st edition both kind of had to either embrace specific exploits, or else go out of their way to prevent them. (e.g. Weren't there multiple paragraphs devoted to the defenses of a certain structure in chapter 5 of Kingmaker specifically to prevent scry & fry?)
Personally, I'm delighted that PF2 is building in some changes which will help eliminate the most "game breaking" of these. And at least in my opinion, doing it in a way that retains the "feel" of Pathfinder 1st edition and 3.5 stories.
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This thread reminds me of the really funny storyline in Order of the Stick where they get ambushed by their fourth edition counterparts and get trounced. Once the 3.5 party realizes all of the limitations of the fourth edition group, they move beyond their range and blast them to bits.
I've found the whole thing very amusing.
Multiple bonus types was one of the things that made it enjoyable. Getting rid of numeric stacking ruins much of the fun.
A valid joy, even if I have left that mostly behind after over 17 years of 3.x games it is one I am well acquainted with.
Some folks like diablo/path of exile and feeling powerful as they crush all beneath them with minmaxed builds. Some like Darksouls where even after focusing on a build you are always just a handful of hits from being a smear.
Some people like rolemaster, they own binders ;)
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Multiple bonus types was one of the things that made it enjoyable. Getting rid of numeric stacking ruins much of the fun.
I ran Wrath of the Righteous and by the higher levels, we started to keep a white board up with all the bonuses and penalties and types just so you could keep track of everything. It just turned into work. Like I'm spending 5 minutes during my turn just trying to figure out what my current to hit bonus is. By not stacking, it helps to limit the MATHfinder problem.
Also in P1 you NEEDED the stacking bonuses just to keep up, but in P2 you don't. In P1 I get high numbers, in P2 I get to do fun things. Completely different paradigm.
Multiple bonus types was one of the things that made it enjoyable. Getting rid of numeric stacking ruins much of the fun.I ran Wrath of the Righteous and by the higher levels, we started to keep a white board up with all the bonuses and penalties and types just so you could keep track of everything. It just turned into work. Like I'm spending 5 minutes during my turn just trying to figure out what my current to hit bonus is. By not stacking, it helps to limit the MATHfinder problem.
Also in P1 you NEEDED the stacking bonuses just to keep up, but in P2 you don't. In P1 I get high numbers, in P2 I get to do fun things. Completely different paradigm.
While true I don't think that is entirely fair given that WotR is a mythic game. It can go silly to a different degree.
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While true I don't think that is entirely fair given that WotR is a mythic game. It can go silly to a different degree.Multiple bonus types was one of the things that made it enjoyable. Getting rid of numeric stacking ruins much of the fun.I ran Wrath of the Righteous and by the higher levels, we started to keep a white board up with all the bonuses and penalties and types just so you could keep track of everything. It just turned into work. Like I'm spending 5 minutes during my turn just trying to figure out what my current to hit bonus is. By not stacking, it helps to limit the MATHfinder problem.
Also in P1 you NEEDED the stacking bonuses just to keep up, but in P2 you don't. In P1 I get high numbers, in P2 I get to do fun things. Completely different paradigm.
Although it's an extreme case, the issue is the same.
Our current game I have an Investigator. In one fight to hit has:
BAB
Str
+1 Weapon
Bane (+2 but only on certain creatures)
Heroism
Bless
Haste
Studied Strike (only 1 target)
You need a spread sheet just to keep track of it all. In P2 its:
Proficiency
Str
+1 Weapon
the highest spell bonus