| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So i'm a bit tired right now so I will hold off on talking to your main points. But one thing to point out is that the Summoner does haves access to some monster rules, they get Knockdown and similar abilities. Which while that isn't swallow whole right now the design space is there.
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
In my opinion, you are heading to the wrong direction. If you want a bunch of automatons to build you a dungeon: talk to your GM. PF2 doesn't force things on the GM anymore. Whatever is in the books is very closely balanced and as such won't break the game. They won't include something that could be exploited to trivialize adventures. But it doesn't mean there are no autonomous automatons in the world, just that giving access to them to the PCs is a GM thing. If it serves the story, your GM should allow it. If it doesn't serve the story or if you try to abuse it, the GM should forbid it.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm fine (even enjoy) with what you described as Macro, which probably maps well to others like "Combat as War", "Simulationism", "PC-NPC Symmetry" and other themes if I understood correctly.
Though my biggest gripe on the older d20 systems was that to enjoy these "Macro" abilities, you must be able to cast mid~high level Spells without outside help. Non-casters might be able to oneshot equal CR foes if optimized correctly, but they were still deprived of surefire ways to circumvent the "Mother May I" situation (OTOH the casters were enjoying Macro by default with the GM having to intervene to stop spiraling out of control).
So it seems that PF2 made an incredibly well done balance between players mostly by hammering down such world-defining spells, and other "definitive abilities" (like Monks losing their total immunity to all poison which let them freely inhabit radioactive wastelands in PF1). As such, no Tippyverse in canon Golarion, nil.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think it's about defeating a world;
In my opinion, this is the exact opposite. Most adventures feature a bunch of adventurers trying to prevent some BBEG to defeat the world. The point of most APs is not to defeat the world but to protect the world.
The players are not the ones who should have large scale abilities. It can be super fun to rule a kingdom, a plane, or affect Golarion in a large scale, but that's not the core of the game. What you call micro design is where the PCs happen to affect the world. It's when micro design defeats macro design.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This is your house rules because Paizo isn't changing the game any time soon.
| 15 people marked this as a favorite. |
If I'm comfortable enough with the setting to allow my players to have the tools to sculpt that world, then I'm also comfortable enough with homebrewing those tools.
If I want them to have a ritual to lift a city into the sky, I can just snap my fingers and make it so. Recipe to craft autonomous golem minions? Have it. Certain spells last longer than a minute out of combat? Here you go. Really, anything outside of combat is super easy to create on the fly.
Paizo could print these things, but they'd have to then GM gate them anyway with a Rare tag, or extra text that basically says "implement at your own caution" (Players then can see these things and assume they can get them somehow, which is honestly a pain). There's very little benefit to doing this, because pre-written content can't survive that level of power and freedom, and homebrew content can whip it up as-needed.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I personally have no interest in gathering an undead horde or an army of automatons. Or building a dungeon of my own. If I'm playing something like kingmaker then yeah, I would like some subsystems for stuff like that but I think perfer them to be a campaign specificity or rules that aren't integrated into the main game. Something with the uncommon or rare tag.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Definitely GM area, maybe 3pp.
I prefer not to have my imagination as either GM or player constrained by what is or isn't available at the macro level.
And what is already out there from 3.5 era or any source really is enough to stir my imagination.
The guide to building monsters and NPCs already provides a good basis for homebrewing abilities, even for players.
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
When one of my players wanted to kill a high level monster by using Create Cottage to smash it with a house, I said “you can try but you have survive direct attacks and concentration checks for 10 rounds” I’ll be darned if he didn’t pull it off. And that was a more interesting outcome for everyone. It was only possible because he saw and took one of the few open ended spells and took it.
I can only speak for myself, but that's not something I want in my games (both as player and GM). So I'm happy it's not something that can be pulled off in PF2.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
- The vast majority of spells like invisibility and illusory disguise don’t last long. Most also have tiny ranges unlike in 3.5/1e when high-level spells could have areas that affected entire cities.
Both the example spells you listed last longer in PF2 than PF1 at the level you get them. You need to get pretty high level before that changes and even then it isn't super significant. Many illusion spells have a 500 foot range and can be made permanent by heightening: Illusory Object, Terrain, and Scene to name a few. For the whole city, check out Fantastic Facade.
- The new rules for minions mean it's almost impossible to create autonomous minions. No golem messengers, no undead workers. It's combat or they just go crazy.
There are various rituals that help with this by now: undead custodians and elemental sentinel spring to mind. Even the basic minion making rituals let you give a creature a simple command that they follow their whole existence.
- There aren’t many at-will abilities. The only character I could find with something like an at-will disguise ability was a witch archetype whereas they were easy to make in 3.5/1e..
A greater hat of disguise can provide this. They are also working on a psychic class that amplifies cantrips to do some interesting things.
- Few noncombat archetypes and abilities. The only archetype I could find with unique non-combat abilities was the Dandy. The rouge doesn’t have any noncombat-based subclass either. hut.
Aren't like... almost all skill feats examples of this? And the whole Investigator class? Are you looking for an option that gives up combat prowess all together? Because that shouldn't exist for PCs, IMO.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If I'm comfortable enough with the setting to allow my players to have the tools to sculpt that world, then I'm also comfortable enough with homebrewing those tools.
If I want them to have a ritual to lift a city into the sky, I can just snap my fingers and make it so. Recipe to craft autonomous golem minions? Have it. Certain spells last longer than a minute out of combat? Here you go. Really, anything outside of combat is super easy to create on the fly.
Pretty much that.
Rituals, Victory Point subsystem, and my own rule of thumb of 'two actions and a skill check' for ad-lib skill actions. Those are my primary tools for adapting the game mechanics to account for anything that the players want to surprise me with in the middle of a game.
| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't agree with all of the conclusions but I do think that, so far, Paizo has been a little too timid with giving players new tools to interact with the world.
Even on a micro level, the game's action economy and feat system seems perfect for giving players access to entirely new tools that change what they do or how they use things... but most activities tend to be pretty conservative in design. You might have a special attack that gives you an extra damage die or a bonus to-hit. You might be able to sub X skill for Y skill in some specific niche, but rarely much more.
The few genuinely new activities I see come up in books tend to be pretty popular so I hope Paizo is willing to lean into that design space a little bit more as the game matures.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
- There aren’t many at-will abilities. The only character I could find with something like an at-will disguise ability was a witch archetype whereas they were easy to make in 3.5/1e..A greater hat of disguise can provide this. They are also working on a psychic class that amplifies cantrips to do some interesting things.
- Few noncombat archetypes and abilities. The only archetype I could find with unique non-combat abilities was the Dandy. The rouge doesn’t have any noncombat-based subclass either. hut.Aren't like... almost all skill feats examples of this? And the whole Investigator class? Are you looking for an option that gives up combat prowess all together? Because that shouldn't exist for PCs, IMO.
On the first point, even the grater hat of disguise only lasts an hour. The 1e oracle I mentioned earlier could alter self at will and have it last all day and even in their sleep at level 11.
On the second point, yes that's the role of skill feats, but there aren't many skill feat-focused archetypes and basically, no skill feat focused classes. The rogue gets a lot more certainly but all of their class feats are combat-oriented. Again to defer to 1e intrigue oracle revelations for what I would like to see more of.
I agree with you; I think that 2e can do these things and do them well, I'm just not sure we have gotten enough material to support it yet. What's more, I think that the design philosophy that 2e has adopted pulls the RAI away from this kind of play.
The greater hat of disguise can be reactivated at will. I guess it doesn't keep you disguised through a night's sleep but that is pretty narrow.
Rogues and Rangers both have a solid array of non-combat feats, and the Investigator obviously has tons. And multiclassing let's any class snag them. Archetypes options include dandy, Loremaster, linguist, ritualist, and a bunch more I'm probably forgetting. There are archetypes for improving stealth, tracking, knowledge, face skills, crafting, Acrobatics, medicine, herbalism... I'm genuinely confused what your definition of a non-combat archetype is. What are they supposed to be doing?
That's setting aside the point that class feats outside of archetypes are generally designed to be combat resources. The whole reason we have skill feats as their own bucket is so players don't need to sacrifice combat potential for a well rounded character.
|
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
To me this sounds like what you had in PF1/3.5 was that you'd decide to do some weird thing, do a deep dive in all the books, come up with a pile of feats items and spell, and go to the GM and say "I have a complete proof of how to reanimate myself in someone else's body" and then the GM would check it out and say "yeah that's a solid proof, you got me there".
And now it's more like "hey GM I think it'd be really cool to play a character who steals someone else's body to walk around in", and then the GM thinks about it and says "yeah well I suppose that's not the weirdest thing in this campaign, you could probably research some ritual to make that happen". And then figures out some way to do your research; maybe some downtime victory point system. And he can even include a book with a theoretical shortcut in a loot pile somewhere that gives you some free bonus research points.
It's a shift of power, to be sure, but I don't think it's a reduction in creative space. PF1 had so much already existing stuff that it sometimes felt hard to look beyond what was already printed. PF2 is much more on giving you a solid mechanism to expand the content with what you need.
Rogues and Rangers both have a solid array of non-combat feats, and the Investigator obviously has tons. And multiclassing let's any class snag them. Archetypes options include dandy, Loremaster, linguist, ritualist, and a bunch more I'm probably forgetting. There are archetypes...
Ok, so this might have been a failure of terminology on my part. Instead of combat vs non-combat, I think it would be more accurate to say numeric vs non-numeric abilities.
to use the Linguist example, the feat Multilingual Cipher is a numeric ability, it only really increments a variable. Spot Translate is a non-numeric ability. It lets you do something that you could not do otherwise and its effect can't be relegated to any single variable. Its utility exists only in the brain of the player.
to use spell examples, Hyperfocus is a numeric spell. it affects something outside of combat but it boils down to a simple numeric advantage on skill checks. the spell Fated Confrontation is non-neumeric. There is math in it but the core of the spell is about changing the story.
In my opinion it these longer more narrative spells and abilities that we need more of.
Gotcha! I think you might be underselling the number of non-numeric abilities on existing published content, but I'm certainly not opposed to more content being published to increase the options.
In my opinion, you are heading to the wrong direction. If you want a bunch of automatons to build you a dungeon: talk to your GM. PF2 doesn't force things on the GM anymore. Whatever is in the books is very closely balanced and as such won't break the game. They won't include something that could be exploited to trivialize adventures. But it doesn't mean there are no autonomous automatons in the world, just that giving access to them to the PCs is a GM thing. If it serves the story, your GM should allow it. If it doesn't serve the story or if you try to abuse it, the GM should forbid it.
I can see why they did it for game mechanics reasons. It is clearly a deliberate gap in the rules.
Physicskid42 notes that there is a macro level and a micro level. The details of rules do have an impact on the larger world. If you are the type of thinker that likes to see this consistency across domains, then minor rules details will sometimes have a large impact on the world.
The rules are clearly written for adventuring and it is up to the GM to decide what happens when the rules out out of scope.
As a GM I am happy to come up with reasonable rules for what a minion can do while its master is not around. I'd probably allow an animated broom to sweep a house every morning even when its master is not there to command it. I do accept that an Owl familiar is going to hunt mice by itself, and a Corgi familiar will chase house cats. Even though the rules say familiars can't attack or even act unless commanded.
The scope of the rules is not stated, but we are asked to apply common sense.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a GM I am happy to come up with reasonable rules for what a minion can do while its master is not around. I'd probably allow an animated broom to sweep a house every morning even when its master is not there to command it. I do accept that an Owl familiar is going to hunt mice by itself, and a Corgi familiar will chase house cats. Even though the rules say familiars can't attack or even act unless commanded.
Why do people keep saying this when the RAW actually states :
"If given no commands, minions use no actions except to defend themselves or to escape obvious harm.
If left unattended for long enough, typically 1 minute, mindless minions usually don't act, animals follow their instincts, and sapient minions act how they please."
That covers the can't act. But not the can't attack.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a GM I am happy to come up with reasonable rules for what a minion can do while its master is not around. I'd probably allow an animated broom to sweep a house every morning even when its master is not there to command it. I do accept that an Owl familiar is going to hunt mice by itself, and a Corgi familiar will chase house cats. Even though the rules say familiars can't attack or even act unless commanded.
Why do people keep saying this when the RAW actually states :
"If given no commands, minions use no actions except to defend themselves or to escape obvious harm.
If left unattended for long enough, typically 1 minute, mindless minions usually don't act, animals follow their instincts, and sapient minions act how they please."
Because that particular RAW isn't fun and doesn't fit with the character concept, plot of the campaign, or random non-mechanical flavor benefit given as a boon by the GM.
Honestly, that is the same reason that a large majority of RAW that gets ignored gets ignored for.
Why do people keep saying this when the RAW actually states :"If given no commands, minions use no actions except to defend themselves or to escape obvious harm.
If left unattended for long enough, typically 1 minute, mindless minions usually don't act, animals follow their instincts, and sapient minions act how they please."
Because that particular RAW isn't fun and doesn't fit with the character concept, plot of the campaign, or random non-mechanical flavor benefit given as a boon by the GM.
Honestly, that is the same reason that a large majority of RAW that gets ignored gets ignored for.
Did you read what you're disagreeing with, or are you just trying to be contrary?
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
As much as I enjoy the 'macro' stuff. The building a sand golem to make you a dungeon in a rocky desert, taking a bit of hair from the son of a king for future scrying or nightmare purposes, having an army of undead to do your bidding, etc... I'm glad they took it out of the 'casters get this stuff for free as they level'.
It still exists in PF2, it's just rare tagged and/or home brewed rituals that do these things. As it always should have been.
Getting a magical mirror that is an extradimensional house and strapping it to a golem you can control for a mobile house is fun and memorable if you loot it in a campaign. As a GM you can then plan for it (to a limited extent).
Getting it for free at level 15 as a player is also fun, I'm not going to lie about that, but it's a pain for the GM to suddenly need to deal with.
I think it's supposed to encourage GMs working with the players instead of a vs. the players mindset, and I'm cool with that.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The reality is that 3.x/PF1 were PCs and PF2 is a Mac. The PCs might have more bugs, run the risk of catching a few more viruses, and take more work to set up but in exchange, they are much more open to customization in the hands of anybody with even moderate skills and/or access to Google. PF2 is the Mac that you slide out of the packaging, admire the shiny design, and then plug in and use exactly as is until you buy the next model.
Clearly, there are a fair few people who like the simplicity of the Mac but for those that want options, they'll always be clawing at the walls of the walled garden.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Honestly, I think this is a perfect niche for a third-party product.
- I don't want it in the base game. I don't want GM to have to say "no that doesn't work, even though the rules says it does." Macro modifications to the world are not suitable to all campaigns, and many of those that they are suitable for have relatively thin slices that they can handle.
- I do want it in a published product. People can talk about "just go ask your GM" and that's okay, but part of the fun of it is doing the research out of character, rather than in-character - digging through the piles of rules to painstakingly figure out how to pull off something awesome, and then seek out the corresponding weird and awkward requirements. Going to your buddy with the GM hat and having him say "Eh... sure. Sounds legit. Here's what it's going to cost you." just doesn't have the same heft to it. Admittedly, a GM who's sufficiently invested int his particular sub-plot to work it out and make it a side focus of a few quests and so forth can give it that kind of heft, but most GMs have limited resource bandwidth of their own, and saving on that stuff is a lot of what published RPG materials are for.
So... third-party. A great big pile of weird magic items and strange rituals and empowered locations and dangerous-but-maybe-exploitable monsters and oddly-shaped requirements that let you dig through and assemble two or three or five together and come out with something really cool. Something that will take some actual thought to dig through and assemble... and preferably something that won't advantage the casters over the martials too badly... and having it all be third-party makes it easy for the GM to pick and choose which things they'll allow or even turn the entire thing down flat.
Probably ought to come with some sort of rules for research to indicate how much effort your character has to go through to find out about the individual bits, once you the player have assembled them.
Now, you do have to deal with the "will enough people buy this" thing, but part of the point of it is that you don't need to worry so much about balance or playtesting, as the ability to do things like set up infinite money-generation engines based on harvesting the misery of commoners is half the point (maybe try setting that one up in Nidal). Probably works better if you include suggestions on interesting complications that the GM can add in if something seems to be too powerful or is going too well.
| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
The PCs might have more bugs, run the risk of catching a few more viruses, and take more work to set up but in exchange, they are much more open to customization in the hands of anybody with even moderate skills and/or access to Google.
I'd have to put a huge asterisks on this. In general PF1 has a slightly greater depth of customization, but so many of those choices were frankly just dead-ends unless you had some very specific things go your way. Or things that sort of work but require vastly more investment than they need (and still don't end up great).
And a lot of that vaunted customization ended up kind of hollow anyways with how same-y PF1 gameplay actually is in practice.
So there's a sort of 'in theory' vs 'in practice' dichotomy here.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The reality is that 3.x/PF1 were PCs and PF2 is a Mac. The PCs might have more bugs, run the risk of catching a few more viruses, and take more work to set up but in exchange, they are much more open to customization in the hands of anybody with even moderate skills and/or access to Google. PF2 is the Mac that you slide out of the packaging, admire the shiny design, and then plug in and use exactly as is until you buy the next model.
Clearly, there are a fair few people who like the simplicity of the Mac but for those that want options, they'll always be clawing at the walls of the walled garden.
With the asterisk that you also have to find a GM both willing to put up with that without restraints and also willing to run it.
So it's also very dependent on having a very specific set of hardware.
| 12 people marked this as a favorite. |
PF1 "wonderful depth of customisation" was its advantage and a nail in the coffin at the same time, because nothing kills your excitement from a game more than discovering that your longsword + shield Fighter with some funky thematic feats is basically laughable third string extra next to some Shikigami Style weapon size abuse or intimidate cheese or Sacred Geometry/Dazing Spell monster of a moderately optimised PC.
If we're into comparing computers, that's the equivalent of a PC user coming to CS tourney with some ancient membrane keyboard and stock noname Chinese mouse next to pr0s with Cherry MX red switches and 16000 dpi Logitech mice. You're on the same team. You simply won't get to do anything, they're that far ahead of you.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd have to put a huge asterisks on this. In general PF1 has a slightly greater depth of customization, but so many of those choices were frankly just dead-ends unless you had some very specific things go your way. Or things that sort of work but require vastly more investment than they need (and still don't end up great).
And a lot of that vaunted customization ended up kind of hollow anyways with how same-y PF1 gameplay actually is in practice.
So there's a sort of 'in theory' vs 'in practice' dichotomy here.
Did people here just not talk to their players and set expectations before characters were rolled up? If you actually chat with your group, gauge the type of game they want to play, and have them all work together to build characters of roughly equal power these systems run fine.
I'm always amazed that people think that all these systems could do was pump out useless garbage or uber optimized cheese with nothing in between.
While "written but optional" great niche for 3P, it's also something that's built into the base game. This kind of thing could be added by Paizo, but kept as "rare".
I'd love to see some rare rituals and/or artifacts that have the potential to bring back that old pathfinder 1 cheesy world affecting power. So you can break your campaign if you want to, but don't have to stop it from breaking your campaign because it exists.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Did people here just not talk to their players and set expectations before characters were rolled up? If you actually chat with your group, gauge the type of game they want to play, and have them all work together to build characters of roughly equal power these systems run fine.I'm always amazed that people think that all these systems could do was pump out useless garbage or uber optimized cheese with nothing in between.
We did, but having to coordinate that heavily and occasionally come to the conclusion that someone's character just wouldn't work in the type of game we were running because the mechanical support for it was so bad one way or the other isn't something I'd call a strength of the system.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We did, but having to coordinate that heavily and occasionally come to the conclusion that someone's character just wouldn't work in the type of game we were running because the mechanical support for it was so bad one way or the other isn't something I'd call a strength of the system.
I would usually work with that player to get them as close as possible (erring on the side of slightly underpowered) and then try to slip them an extra magic item or two to balance things out. Either that or the weaker builds were the RP focus of the game while stronger builds got to dominate combat.
It wasn't as mindless to GM as some modern systems, but it also wasn't as bad as others.
|
|
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'd have to put a huge asterisks on this. In general PF1 has a slightly greater depth of customization, but so many of those choices were frankly just dead-ends unless you had some very specific things go your way. Or things that sort of work but require vastly more investment than they need (and still don't end up great).
And a lot of that vaunted customization ended up kind of hollow anyways with how same-y PF1 gameplay actually is in practice.
So there's a sort of 'in theory' vs 'in practice' dichotomy here.
Did people here just not talk to their players and set expectations before characters were rolled up? If you actually chat with your group, gauge the type of game they want to play, and have them all work together to build characters of roughly equal power these systems run fine.
I'm always amazed that people think that all these systems could do was pump out useless garbage or uber optimized cheese with nothing in between.
The main issue with this is just that there are quite a lot of character concepts that just don't fit into certain levels of optimization - the larger the gap between a badly-made and a well-made (with respect to optimization) character, the more you're going to functionally remove content from the list of options for players. If you sit down and chat with your group to gauge the rough power level intended for the table and the consensus is 'incredibly well optimized', good luck trying to play a broad range of options and contribute to the party. Similarly, if the table is filled with new players and the table decides to aim for a very low level of optimization, there is a broad range of options you can't use. That's not to mention 'options' that were just straight up unusable - your Prone Shooters, for example. There was definitely a lot of content that was functionally not available to characters on a given table based on expected power level.
I think Kineticist is a good example for this - it's got a high power floor, and a low power ceiling. If you've got good dex and con and max out your Elemental Overflow, you've basically got as good a kineticist as you'll ever get. Besides a kinetic diadem, there aren't even many magical items to support your combat actions. This gives them a pretty guaranteed spot in the middle of the possible PF1 power levels, without the ability to adapt upwards or downwards in the way most classes have some degree of freedom there. By far the most common comments I hear when pf1 kineticist is discussed are one of two options: either that the kineticist is incredibly OP, dealing huge amounts of damage that trivializes the encounter, or that the kineticist is weak and unable to be optimized to contribute to any meaningful encounter. One might assume that there's a good chunk of people playing in the middle of that optimization band that just don't talk about kineticist as much, but I think it's pretty emblematic of the issues that the large power disparity would cause in PF1 options; an objectively pretty average class is commonly banned for being too powerful, or never picked for being too weak.
EDIT: This was written while I was writing:
We did, but having to coordinate that heavily and occasionally come to the conclusion that someone's character just wouldn't work in the type of game we were running because the mechanical support for it was so bad one way or the other isn't something I'd call a strength of the system.I would usually work with that player to get them as close as possible (erring on the side of slightly underpowered) and then try to slip them an extra magic item or two to balance things out. Either that or the weaker builds were the RP focus of the game while stronger builds got to dominate combat.
It wasn't as mindless to GM as some modern systems, but it also wasn't as bad as others.
On top of the issues with saying 'I'm going to focus more on you in the roleplay side of things because your character concept cannot be optimized to the point where they're actually contributing roughly equally', saying that modern systems are 'mindless to GM' is just absurd. The core act of GMing is storytelling, and I know of almost no GMs that get to make all the tweaks, changes, set-pieces, encounters, and so on that they'd want to - you do what you can, but you've only got the week to prep, and you're busy. The more time you spend having to tweak the item balance and figure out how you're going to change the story to account for the character(s) you're trying to give more focus to, the less time you'll spend on anything else. Modern systems aren't "mindless to GM", they're just letting you allocate your time as a GM towards things that aren't tweaking the system to try and actually make the party roughly equally contribute as a group, because they do so from the design of the game.
|
|
| 15 people marked this as a favorite. |
Turns out casual players in my experience don’t like having their character choices dictated to them by the experts in the party or the GM. If I want to get the most out of the PF1 chassis that means I want to be doing cool and crazy stuff. This means they have to as well and turns out people don’t like having choices dictated to them. So either they’re unhappy as their oddball build doesn’t work or the optimizer is upset since they can’t do the cool stuff. And since gaming groups are usually determined by things like “I work with them” or “they’re my friends” that usually doesn’t correlate with gaming approach.
This is definitely something I found quite noticeable when I started moving some of my tables over to PF2 at the end of last year. One of my tables had three players who started PF1 together with me in 2015, one player who started with me in 2017, and one player who started with me in 2018. The three players who started at the same time felt comfortable with the system and felt like they knew what they were doing in the session. Both of the players who came in later mentioned, after we moved away from PF1, that they enjoyed that everyone was learning PF2 together. They felt like they were on equal footing with everyone else, and the rules weren't so imposing that they just listened to the veterans. I'm confident both of them could've picked up the mechanics to the same degree of familiarity as the veterans if they'd started from beginning, but the amount of control the veterans (and myself, all mostly unintentionally) had been exerting over their characters meant they never learnt the fundamentals. It's not good for the enjoyment of a lot of people to have that disenfranchisement from their own character.
| 20 people marked this as a favorite. |
Not to mention the fact that the "GM will make everyone at the table negotiate the power level" concept requires you to have a GM who knows the power level issues well.
Most GMs aren't forum goers who can recall the whole Crane Wing Saga from memory or can tell you which Hunter archetypes are blue and which ones are green and are retired/independently wealthy/parking security guards leaving them with oodles of time to research the game.
Most of them are family people who expect the game to run as it's written, start their game telling everyone that all Paizo material is allowed, first 5 levels it's all cool and then the Shikigami Style person starts overshadowing everyone else.
Then those GM head to the big Pathfinder Facebook group and ask for advice, getting replies such as "use traps", "Tucker's kobolds" or "make a special NPC that goes after that one PC" which is everything non-advice that only makes the situation worse.
This is because most people, for good reasons, trust the game to be balanced and don't even think that "the game balance of PF1 is next to non-existent" as a thing that needs to be considered. They'll try in-game solutions to what is an out-of-game problem, and those don't work.
(This is of course only made worse by the fact that a large chunk of PF1 fanbase started playing RPGs with D&D 3.5, never played anything else, and think that such wobbly balance is something every RPG has.)
If negotiating power levels and telling optimisers to done it down and casuals to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps is a tough sell at the onset of the campaign, doing so midway through is pretty much impossible to do.