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If a game system requiresa third-partyany app to run smoothly, that's a design flaw. :P
As someone who recommends Pathbuilder to players who aren't grokking the ABC character creation, "requires" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. I think much like visual learners differ from more hands-on learners, Pathbuilder serves people well who need all of that information placed in front of them.
I think I'm the only member of my table group who doesn't use it because it makes the entire process more tedious for me. Again, probably with how people process information differently.
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Honestly, I always advise people to use paper and a pencil, instead of any kind of app, for their first character or three in any system, to understand where everything is come from, and how things are presented.
Yeah, this is where I fall.
And if Pathfinder doesn't "require" Pathbuilder "to run smoothly", I wasn't talking about it. It was a deliberately conditional statement. :P
[scrubbing most of my post because this is turning way too much into just another argument thread for my liking.]
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But when its a FREE app its only a minor design flaw :-)If a game system requires
a third-partyany app to run smoothly, that's a design flaw. :P
I'd go a step further and say that PF2 is designed on purpose the way it is, with software design principles, so that apps and 3rd party software can easily integrate services for the game despite it being a complex rule system.
The game is designed in such a way that people like RedRazor can make apps like that, that's a feature, not a flaw.
Look at how many helper apps exist. Sure they didn't make the software themselves, but they left the keys to the app service factory on the ground winked twice and turned their back.
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We're getting kind of off-topic, so let's agree to disagree and get back on track. I'd suggest someone move this topic off-thread, if anything here feels worth exploring in a proper argument of its own, but it doesn't belong here. :P
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Slighty tangential to Pathfinder 2:
They should have made the Wrath of the Righteous computer game in Pathfinder 2 rues. A waste to not have a bunch of players learn the system through crpgs (as many might have done with dnd/Baldurs Gate/NWN). Hope the next is.
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Yeah, that would have made sense. I bet it was a logistical thing, or there just weren't enough game designers fluent in PF2 yet. Still, a shame.
So, personally, I don't like that the setting of Golarion has always been so closely tied to Pathfinder. This was true in First Edition, too, to a lesser extent. I think it discourages new players from one of the most fun non-directly-playing pastimes I found as a young D&Der--fresh worldbuilding! I loved how blank the slate felt, how easy it felt to implement my own setting ideas. Obviously, you can still do that in Pathfinder, but it's less encouraged, I feel, because of how deeply setting non-secular the books are. It might not even occur to new players to be motivated to do it.
One of TSR's greatest gifts to D&D was torpedoing their business ventures to give us a ton of cool creative campaign settings to choose from. I'm not saying Paizo should go that far, but I thought 3.5's gentle "hey, here's a few established settings to choose from, here's a fairly vague rulebook without a ton of setting info aside from gods, go nuts" approach was nice. Could clerics function without gods? Who knew? It was left up to the GM. That sort of attitude might be less short-term newbie introduction friendly, but I think long-term it encouraged newbies to explore a lot more of the creative side of it, which is one of the most rewarding facets of GMing.
I like Golarion a lot more than I used to. The less I have to hear about Cheliax, the more I'm able to focus on the actually interesting content--Varisia, Arcadia, the Mwangi Expanse, etc. But I didn't sign on for the Golarion RPG. I like my D&D and D&D-offshoots to serve as basically setting-neutral tools for exploring a magical medieval-ish fantasy world. There's so much potential that way for new ideas to surface. Building Pathfinder around Golarion feels to me, creatively speaking, like an unforced error.
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It makes sense why they went the way they did, but it's been awkward to have players decide to check out Pathfinder because of WOTR only to realize that some of the classes and characters they want to play don't actually exist in modern Pathfinder.
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There are people out there who don't use Pathbuilder to generate your characters? Crazy.
I use a pencil and paper, alternatively a spreadsheet.
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It's also using basically the engine that that they'd made for Kingmaker, right? Probably would have been a good deal more work to change for the new rules set.Slighty tangential to Pathfinder 2:
They should have made the Wrath of the Righetous computer game in Pathfinder 2 rues. A waste to not have a bunch of players learn the system through crpgs (as many might have done with dnd/Baldurs Gate/NWN). Hope the next is.
While I agree that a 2e CRPG would have been most preferable, it is a bit awkward to use WOTR for it because there's no basis for how Mythic is supposed to work in PF2e. Would it be improved Hero Point options + Mythic Archetypes (my homebrew solution), fast XP gain + epic levels, a secondary level track that increases numbers alongside the main level track, or something else entirely?
Also Owlcat seems dead set on RTwP gameplay, which might be a little awkward for 2e. Not sure why they choose to prioritize it, but that's how it is.
It's pretty much this. They had an engine in PF1 and they also began work on WotR before PF2 was announced. It would have been a huge setback to their development time and would have been no doubt costly to switch gears so suddenly (and I believe WotR was close to completion by the time PF2 released). I also wouldn't be surprised if we saw a third entry in the series just to get the most out of the engine.
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This is actually the only significant objection I have to it (other than my generic objections to all kinds of D&Disms, but that's kind of complaining that water is wet). Golarion isn't a bad setting, but if I wanted to run the game in an original setting, there's a vast amount of heavy lifting I'd have to do, so much is set up with Golarion in mind.
So, personally, I don't like that the setting of Golarion has always been so closely tied to Pathfinder.
Do you have an examples, out of curiosity? I mean no pressure but I've found it to be fairly easy to just... play in whatever setting I come up with. Pretty much the only mechanical work I have to do is make my own deities.
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Do you have an examples, out of curiosity? I mean no pressure but I've found it to be fairly easy to just... play in whatever setting I come up with. Pretty much the only mechanical work I have to do is make my own deities.
I would imagine most of this would be tying the region specific archetypes and items to similar areas in a homebrew setting mostly. Which I guess could be a lot of make work for the gm.
I handle that on a case by case as they come up personally. I can't really think of any other mechanics that tie PF2 directly to Golarion though. Just access entries.
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one thing i dislike is how, how to put this...
in the core book you have fighter, you have barbarian, you have flurry ranger, your bard or sorc or druid ect. who just.... have their base level of power just availible to them outside of encounters that specifically nullify it
but going forward with our newer classes, with swashbuckler, orical, magas, and the look of the upcoming thaumaturge and psychic, you have to jump through hoops play these little mini games mid combat in order to reach the same level of power that most of the core classes just... have.
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one thing i dislike is how, how to put this...
in the core book you have fighter, you have barbarian, you have flurry ranger, your bard or sorc or druid ect. who just.... have their base level of power just availible to them outside of encounters that specifically nullify it
but going forward with our newer classes, with swashbuckler, orical, magas, and the look of the upcoming thaumaturge and psychic, you have to jump through hoops play these little mini games mid combat in order to reach the same level of power that most of the core classes just... have.
Yeah this is a thing that has been talked about quite a bit. I hope it gets better in the future, but after 3 books with new classes and this still being true for pretty much every one of them except the Summoner, I'm not sure...
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5. Slings have limited support.I too want more awesome slings. I wanted this in 1e also. Somewhere in the dark basement storage of the forums there's a thread thousands of posts long about wanting more awesome slings back then.
—crossbow continue to be suboptimal choices compared to bows. While I understand perfectly the historical reasonings, we are playing a fantasy game, not a historical reenactment. Crossbows need to be better.I mean, you could make an argument that the historical reasonings aren't even that strong, considering that crossbows not only competed with bows, but in many non-England areas outcompeted and replaced them.
In the hands of skilled users, not in the baby-simple-weapon-for-incompetent-conscripts sense. I'll see Robin Hood and raise you a William Tell.
I was there with you in that thread, man. It was great. Lots of stuff for my own 3.x campaign as a result.
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Thanks to everybody who's helped to keep this thread on-topic and refrained from attacking others' playstyles.
TTRPGs are an incredible medium because they are designed to corral fun, to steer it in various directions, even though everyone has a different competing idea of what "fun" is. It's like herding cats, and there will always be different styles of fun developing, and it's easy to feel attacked when someone doesn't not find your style, well, fun.
I think it can be really interesting to try to understand what other people enjoy, as long as we keep it from getting judgmental. It's fair to dislike a system for corralling players away from what you find fun, as long as you recognize that this corralling isn't an accident of bad design, but a conscious choice that differs from the choice you would make. I dislike the new ability score generation. I think it runs counter to the kind of game I enjoy. Other people felt stressed by the potential for picking the "wrong" abilities, or hated point buy on principle, and the new ability score generation feels less fidgety to them.
Obviously, it's not all about playstyle. I do also feel that the new ability score generation is bad design for what it was intended to do, and that's where arguments start. But it's really useful to be able to differentiate "this media is trying to do something that isn't to my taste" from "this media is failing at the thing it's trying to do".
** spoiler omitted **...
*sobs* Our playstyles are incompatible! We can't play together!
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I haven't actually gotten to play 2E (yet), so I can't say I have any gripes regarding mechanics (again, yet). But I do have some bugaboos:
1. The formatting of the Core Rulebook, as has been mentioned. As someone who taught himself how to play 3.5 by reading the PHB back to front, this book is an absolute nightmare. "Here's a list of conditions. You want to know what they actually do? Skip ahead ~200 pages, obviously!" I didn't realize you add your level to everything you're proficient in until page 444!
2. The general wording of rules, and how everything feels so... codified. Sometimes it feels like I stopped reading a game manual and started reading a legal document. "Wizards cast spells" has become "You gain access to the CAST A SPELL activity." Adventuring isn't just a thing you do anymore, now you enter EXPLORATION MODE. Again, I haven't actually played yet, but it seems like this makes the whole thing feel more like a game and less like a *story.*
3. The change in hobgoblin art. LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOY.
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The downtime/exploration/encounter modes are basically just there to guide the GM for "what they need to be tracking" in a given situation. Obviously you aren't going to do round by round/square by square when someone is at home working on their crafting project.
So we're just codifying the distinction between "what are you doing this week" versus "what are you doing now, until something changes" versus "what are you doing this second." It's "I'm looking for gigs to perform at" versus "I'm searching over by the bookshelves" versus "I strike, step away, then cast shield"
Like things like "all intervals of time and space are quantized down to 6 second intervals and 5' squares" dropping when you're not worried about combat or other tense danger makes a lot of sense.
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A large number of Backgrounds are location-specific, and if you don't have those locations or something pretty similar they're unusable. And you want your own locations to have those, too. That's also true of a non-trivial number of Dedicatations (and those are worse to create from the ground up than Backgrounds; they're the replacement for prestige classes after all, and aren't really built to a common metric beyond "at these levels you'll get something") This applies to ancestries to a lesser degree, too. There's a scattering of other things, mostly having to do with magic, but those are the biggies.
How are the regional backgrounds unusable? They are indistinguishable from the general backgrounds once you file the serial number off.
Playing in a different setting should be as easy as omitting the Lost Omens books from your table, except to steal things for your own setting.
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The downtime/exploration/encounter modes are basically just there to guide the GM for "what they need to be tracking" in a given situation. Obviously you aren't going to do round by round/square by square when someone is at home working on their crafting project.
So we're just codifying the distinction between "what are you doing this week" versus "what are you doing now, until something changes" versus "what are you doing this second." It's "I'm looking for gigs to perform at" versus "I'm searching over by the bookshelves" versus "I strike, step away, then cast shield"
Like things like "all intervals of time and space are quantized down to 6 second intervals and 5' squares" dropping when you're not worried about combat or other tense danger makes a lot of sense.
There are people on these boards who take it as holy writ though, not merely guidelines (just enter any discussion about familiars to see what I mean). The lack of any actual guidelines on how to manage said "modes" in the Core Rulebook does not help matters. Are there even any such guidelines elsewhere, such as in the GameMastery Guide?
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I'm actually pretty flexible. I still play Pathfinder 2.0! It's not like ability score generation is that big a deal, it's just something that was lost that I think is worth at least remembering.
I am seeing a lot of posts that are either outright arguing or on the verge of starting arguments. Can we at least be a little careful with the "just asking questions"/"oh, yeah, I guess that's a problem for people like you" posts?
Oh, also, 100% agreed on hobgoblins. I didn't love the old art, but the new art for a lot of monster races is just... sometimes it feels like Paizo just gives their monster artists a card on it with the message in crayon, "do not let DeviantArt draw horny fanart of them". And, like, I'm not saying I want the risque fanart, but I like having options for my monster PCs, you know? It's not like this will work. It's just gonna make the art way weirder.
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Speaking of the art. I dislike how they changed the iconics.
Ex: Amiri whent from a cool looking character to one that looks like a teenager who spends all their time in the basement. She honestly look like she is sick.
And before anyone starts thinking I am complaining about sexualization. Get out of here I couldn't careless about that. But there is 0 reason why Ezren should go from a Wizard carrying a bunch of scrolls and items to some cartoon character. Or why Kyra would look like she is wearing bad cosplay.
********************
* P.S. I understand changing the Summoner and Oracle iconic. Those two classes are nearly unrelated after all mechanically to the past iconic.But the Gunslinger iconic?
Nahlmika is the best iconic in all of Pathfinder. Fight me.
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I just looked her up, and I think I really like Nahlmika. I don't actually remember who the original gunslinger iconic was. Matter of taste, I guess.
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Seconded.Nahlmika is the best iconic in all of Pathfinder. Fight me.Speaking of the art. I dislike how they changed the iconics.
Ex: Amiri whent from a cool looking character to one that looks like a teenager who spends all their time in the basement. She honestly look like she is sick.
And before anyone starts thinking I am complaining about sexualization. Get out of here I couldn't careless about that. But there is 0 reason why Ezren should go from a Wizard carrying a bunch of scrolls and items to some cartoon character. Or why Kyra would look like she is wearing bad cosplay.
********************
* P.S. I understand changing the Summoner and Oracle iconic. Those two classes are nearly unrelated after all mechanically to the past iconic.But the Gunslinger iconic?
Stout shotgun momma with big hair and piercing amber eyes makes my heart flutter. My Pathfinder waifu is a grandma and I'm not ashamed. I'm smitten.
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I really don't like that Soaring Shape isn't available until level eight.
I get why. Balance-wise, it's the right move.
But... oof. Otherwise, wild shape is so drastically better and more fun. Focus spells make wild shape into something I can do casually--morphing into a crow, a cat, a wolf, just to goof around or solve a particular task, not worrying about "wasting" the ability. I do wish I could grab a swim speed or the like at level 1, rather than level 3, but by-and-large it's a tremendous improvement. At level 4, I can be a dog for 50 minutes, rest for ten, then be a dog for another fifty minutes, and keep doing that all day, never having to shift out. That's fantastic.
But let me turn into a crow at lower levels! Let me turn into an otter at first level! I know it's not balanced, screw balance, let shapeshifters have fun, Paizo!
:P
I don't run 3PP, and I think I misspoke on players being a dragon in PF1 (outside of a half-dragon template), that was a 3.x thing that never got an official port over.I believe there's actually a 3PP for that now. Does anyone know if it's any good?Building NPCs like PCs is a perfectly RAW method in PF2.Only for ancestries that a player could also use. You can't run a dragon the same way, but you could give a dragon class levels in PF1 if you so desired. You could also run one as a player too, something that PF2 also disallows.
They did haz some dragon-styled playing via 3pp only tho. ;)
Oh, also, 100% agreed on hobgoblins. I didn't love the old art, but the new art for a lot of monster races is just... sometimes it feels like Paizo just gives their monster artists a card on it with the message in crayon, "do not let DeviantArt draw horny fanart of them". And, like, I'm not saying I want the risque fanart, but I like having options for my monster PCs, you know? It's not like this will work. It's just gonna make the art way weirder.
Ya gots me fully-morale supportin's for more NSFW fanarts out there, too. ;)
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I didn't love the old art, but the new art for a lot of monster races is just... sometimes it feels like Paizo just gives their monster artists a card on it with the message in crayon, "do not let DeviantArt draw horny fanart of them".
Oh my god.
OH MY GOD
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Nahlmika is the best iconic in all of Pathfinder. Fight me.Speaking of the art. I dislike how they changed the iconics.
Ex: Amiri whent from a cool looking character to one that looks like a teenager who spends all their time in the basement. She honestly look like she is sick.
And before anyone starts thinking I am complaining about sexualization. Get out of here I couldn't careless about that. But there is 0 reason why Ezren should go from a Wizard carrying a bunch of scrolls and items to some cartoon character. Or why Kyra would look like she is wearing bad cosplay.
********************
* P.S. I understand changing the Summoner and Oracle iconic. Those two classes are nearly unrelated after all mechanically to the past iconic.But the Gunslinger iconic?
MIKAMAMA
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I didn't love the old art, but the new art for a lot of monster races is just... sometimes it feels like Paizo just gives their monster artists a card on it with the message in crayon, "do not let DeviantArt draw horny fanart of them".Oh my god.
OH MY GOD
I am literally so relieved I am not the only person who noticed this
(I think part of it, though definitely not the entirety, may be a push within the company to reduce the reliance on fanservice. Fanservice has an awkward history with gamers, basically almost exclusively pandering to straight guys and making it very uncomfortable for teenagers to read the books at school. This is not me saying I oppose fanservice--very much the opposite, actually. Let hobgoblins be hot butches and musclebros, you cowards)
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You're keeping this entire industry alive single-handedly, you know.
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Hasn’t stopped me.
Freehold needs more fanservice.
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Honestly I love the Mouse Guard-esque kobolds (though I wish, if anything, they'd gone harder on the aesthetic, and maybe finally given us canon fluffy/feathery kobold options), I just think Wayne Art Reynolds' style, though amazing for many purposes, trends naturally un-horny for anything other than completely human-like creatures. There are exceptions, of course.
Maybe I'll start a thread about this. Title it something really dumb and clickbaity, like "Is Paizo trying to BAN HORNYNESS".
I think I understand moving away from fanservice, since they're trying to be more kid-friendly (as the recent ban on newspaper comic-level swearing has demonstrated, gripegripe). That said, I'm kind of a firm advocate for the rights of people to be horny on main. It would have been nice to see one scantily-clad catgirl in the Ancestry Guide, is all I'm saying.
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It's a mix of "feminists criticizing dudes who acted like women in fantasy only existed to be objectified for sexualization", which is obviously fair, and "would-be feminists who think the sexualization itself was the problem", which is a little more frustrating. It's a conservative urge co-opting a progressive criticism.
A lot of people cite the Male Gaze without understanding what it is. It's not "a straight dude is horny, outrageous". It's "media in general is being created with the assumption that the default viewer will be a cis straight white etc etc white man, and that's not great for everyone who isn't that". A lot of lesbians and bisexual women have gotten called out, or worse, had it implied they aren't real women, just because they liked to create art of the people they found attractive. Male Gaze discourse can be very uncomfortable for me for this reason.
I'd honestly love fanservicey depictions of femme women, butch women, fem men, masc men, and everyone and everything in between. Fanservice was never the problem, it was just being handled badly.
Is there already a thread about this, or should someone just start one, at this point? I find the subject super interesting, but it runs the risk of derailing this thread.
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Also, when are we going to see more NPC art by Miguel Regodón Harkness? (Okay, he did covers and interiors for Extinction Curse, I haven't read that one as much. Just felt like I hadn't seen their work in awhile.)
Miguel has several pieces in Secrets of Magic.
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Oh, actually, I have a broader gripe with PF 1.0 and 2.0 art. I'm going to try to not call out WAR directly here--his art isn't my cuppa, but I recognize that he's an incredibly skilled and creative artist.
That said, I really don't like Pathfinder's art style. I don't like that Pathfinder has such a clear art style, and I don't like how it veers so strongly towards this more sort of samey pseudo-realistic approach.
D&D 3.5 has, by far, my favorite art of every edition, because its books were illustrated almost like... like medieval guide books, like journals that multiple different writers had contributed to. Every creature was illustrated a little differently, with little jokes and background gags. Sometimes it was a set of pencil sketches, sometimes it was watercolor, sometimes it was inked, sometimes it was computer-drawn. Sometimes it was cartoony, sometimes it was hyper-realistic, sometimes it was right in the middle.
It made the books such a wonderful treat to browse through, especially the monster books. Each dragon had a little "for scale" picture of humanoids next to it, either fleeing in terror or standing before it respectfully. The drider was wrapping a human up in webs. The pseudodragon was wrapped around an orc skull. The chaos beast was devouring a man. The invisible stalker was poised to kill some dude in a courtyard, while the phasm had so little context, you could barely tell what it was without investigation.
Nowadays, with standardized art, it's just... it feels like everything's drawn with Wayne Reynolds's style, with very little flexibility. Every kobold looks like the life-size kobold replica.
This is probably harsh, and in fairness, I haven't read a lot of the new books beyond skimming the Ancestry Guide and browsing the CRB. It's just a thing I miss that I'd love to see more of. Like, I want to see kobolds drawn in a Mouse Guard art style. I want to see anime eye driders and Da Vinci pencil sketch dryads and ink print ghosts. I want the messy slush pile back.
I guess "I want the messy slush pile back" accounts for a lot of my problems with Pathfinder. Like how they're still enforcing "you have to have a god to worship", even when goblins explicitly tend to have a more animist, "anything can be a god if you believe hard enough" attitude.