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You have that literally backwards. Both of those builds are absolutely horrible in PF1.
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Just as a caution: the huge list of specific leveled guns from Starfinder is one of the reasons all of our Starfinder groups gave up on the system. It's tedious and annoying, and I have to help players sort through everything to get an upgrade that's similar enough to the gun they already have and like.
Definitely not a lesson PF2 should be learning from SF.
INDEED!
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In a roleplaying game, the game mechanics have to be based on reality; otherwise, the mechanics are too abstract for the players to use intuitively.Well, sure. But when someone starts a discussion about the rules with, "This rule isn't right and needs to be changed because in real life people can do ..."
Nope.
That's not how good game rules are created and balanced.
True but it is good to be able to get close to the flavour. If the flavour gets too far from real life, well not really real life but rather the particular fantasy we have about it, them the game can loose it relevance and its audience.
Its a balance. We know we have hitpoints because combat is actually too deadly to realistically simulate in a heroic game. We do need some gamey mechanics for the game to work well, but we can't lose too much sense of it being a simulated world, or we may as well just go play a board game.
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Pó
You have that literally backwards. Both of those builds are absolutely horrible in PF1.
Indeed. Vital Strike also wasn't available until BAB+6, which could be as late as level 12 for some clasesz. By level 6 an archer was making 4 full back attacks with haste. By comparison, anyone in PF2 can get Crossbow Terror by level 6 which is actually competitive damage with a composite short bow.
And anyone other than gunslingers or specific archetypes needed feats just to use guns at all, plus rapid reload and alchemical paper carriages to make full attacks happen. By comparison, guns now at least work without feats. Gunslingers get the best accuracy which makes them best at leveraging the fatal trait, but there are non-fatal firearms and you can get running reload through various archetypes if you want to invest. Precision Ranger with a harmona gun works perfectly well, too.
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True but it is good to be able to get close to the flavour. If the flavour gets too far from real life, well not really real life but rather the particular fantasy we have about it, them the game can loose it relevance and its audience.
Well, the purpose of verisimilitude is that the whole enterprise requires cultivating an imagined world that everybody at the table collectively understands. One easy way to enable this is "realism" since everybody understands that fire is hot, that glass breaks, that ice is slippery, etc. But that's not the only way to make an imagined world make sense to an audience. Like there's a reason fantasy worlds often have "Elves" and "Dwarves" but rarely have "Glazklets" and "Xiqubs" because people aware of popular culture have an idea about Dwarves and Elves (even if *our* Elves are different) but those other two things are words I just made up.
The thing about "Weapons aren't deadly enough" is that this is in fact a normal thing in a lot of fiction. Like how many video games do you have to shoot the enemy a lot of times, or hit them with your sword again and again? How many movies have the heroes survive a lot of damage? These aren't really hard things to understand in a fantasy game.
Guns in fiction rarely actually work like actual guns, so this isn't really a thing to worry too much about.
Everyone complaining about PF1e Gunslingers.
You all forget how CLOSE you have to be for the touch attack?
Pepperbox is 20 ft. Easily within range to get mauled.
It costs 1 grit PER INCREMENT. Use distance to deal with them. Anyone should. Why is the canon golem so close? Why is the red dragon not flying high and raining down destruction and then Flyby Attack the Gunslinger?
Also, there's two easy ways to deal with them for anyone.
SUNDER and DISARM
Done. Lose the gun, the gunslinger lost 90% of their features.
You DMs also should make heavy use of ranged attackers as well. Even enemy gunslingers.
The problem isn't that gunslingers were unbeatable if your GM planned around them. It was that you needed to plan around them. And depending on the campaign. And they would do incredibly better in, say, Giantslayer than Ironfang Invasion.
Which is generally not the case for just about any build in PF2. Really, that's the problem with PF1 balance in a nutshell. You basically needed a gentleman's agreement for your power ceiling.
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PF2 needs a one sided agreement between the GM and themselves to let your abilities actually work in defiance of RAW and its common sense.
What does this even mean?
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...Yeah been wondering that myself. PF2 is very mechanically sound and just about everything works as written and works well.
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I wouldn't say that's really 'needs' on the same level though. More that just sometimes Paizo makes decisions irrespective of balance so there's leeway to adjust them.
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I never was against guns in fantasy I just found Paizo 1E implementation of them badly done.
Note they were warned about how strong targeting Touch AC would be by their own playtesters and decided to simply ignore the feedback presenting them as is and making one ranged weapon better than the rest.
Touch Ac for many creatures is simply too easy to hit and even a minimally maxed out Gunslinger never missed. Sure one can target or take away the weapon. Smart posters carried or made sure to save enough money to buy or craft a new one.
If they are going to target regular AC in either PF2E or the Remaster is a bonus to me.
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I never was against guns in fantasy I just found Paizo 1E implementation of them badly done.
Note they were warned about how strong targeting Touch AC would be by their own playtesters and decided to simply ignore the feedback presenting them as is and making one ranged weapon better than the rest.
Touch Ac for many creatures is simply too easy to hit and even a minimally maxed out Gunslinger never missed. Sure one can target or take away the weapon. Smart posters carried or made sure to save enough money to buy or craft a new one.
If they are going to target regular AC in either PF2E or the Remaster is a bonus to me.
Good news! Guns already exist in PF2, almost certainly won't be touched in the Remaster, and touch AC doesn't exist anymore. They target regular AC.
Makes me so happy words cannot express it.
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Makes me so happy words cannot express it.
Eh....IMO guns are in a little bit of an awkward place. There's honestly not much benefit to them (for non-gunslingers) compared to just using a bow (really the short bow is king in PF2 compared to longbow dominance of PF1). There are some nifty tricks that can be picked up, but the reload functionality really makes them difficult to use, and they don't enough more damage to make sense to use them over a bow IMO.
But yeah, PF2 guns definitely don't break the game the way PF1 guns did.
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Historically, until the revolver and the rifles of the mid 1800s came about, guns were inferior to bows and crossbows.
Lines of musketmen became a thing due to economics rather the power. Training a longbowman takes years and requires a lot of physical strength. I don't know for crossbows but I imagine the strength issue is still there.
Guns could be made relatively cheaper out of lower quality materials and didn't take strength to use. Training SHOULD have been an issue... if you cared about your guys living. But the armies of the day didn't.
The entire line of musketmen system is designed to be a meat grinder and it's assumed most of the soldiers on both sides can't hit their targets - but large crowd fire meant they hit something and if you could position yours better they'd grind down the other side faster.
Canons by contrast had an advantage going back as far as 800AD, and have been part of battles where guns were around for that long...
Once the revolver and better rifle barrels came about things changed. The revolver meant ammo and so you weren't a one and done - so you'd want new tactics. And the better rifles meant accuracy and suddenly training has a massive payoff in results.
So...
I don't mind that PF2E guns are weak in the hands of most people. That's pretty true for the kind of tech they represent. Even as far back as the age of early single shot pistols and muskets - someone who was an expert marksman was deadlier with them. It just wasn't as economical to train that person to be that for the first 1000 years guns were around.
The issue timeline wise is that Pathfinder was closer to early 1900s than to early 1600s. Although now it feels like they went back 100-200 years with how bad guns have become.
That would mean railroads, autos, telephones, airplanes, paved roads, refrigeration, trucking, coal and steam powered shipping...
And then gatling guns, canons, revolvers, and refined rifling.
In such a world, outside of magic items fortifications, metal and leather armor, bows, crossbows, and most melee weapons would be pointless.
The moment any untrained farm hand can pick up a 6 shooter and blast away, or grab a rifle that can be reliably scoped and aimed to shoot hundreds of yards and reload in under a second or even have cartridge ammo... everything changes.
It took just over 1000 years to go from guns and muskets in ~800AD to the revolver and modern rifling of the mid 1800s. But the 1900s, that's a whole other set of changes that goes way beyond the 'gun' era.
(The one most people forget that changed the world the most is refrigeration, followed by trucking. Before those 2 people had to live no more than a day or two away from farms and supply networks. It's why towns and villages in most of the world are a half day's walk apart at the MOST. Only in a few parts of the Americas and remote places settled in the modern era does the distance get wider - something a LOT of fantasy GMs fail to understand.)
The real "jump forward" that Pathfinder firearms are going to have is when the Gunworks at Alkenstar develop the precision machining to do rifling on the barrels and high quality springs. Then guns are going to become the dominant weapon in the setting.
But even then the advantage of guns is primarily "you have an effective range of 1500 feet" and "a semi-automatic action" as opposed to "you have an effective range of 120 feet."
Except high level heroes will always be impossible for common folks to even hit and magic runes will keep wealth spent on your absolute best warriors more useful than more guns. In Golarion, teaching people how to cast magic missile or use scrolls of it would be the much more effective mass army. Golarion will never actually follow earth advancements because of level existing as a real-ish thing
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...people had to live no more than a day or two away from farms and supply networks. It's why towns and villages in most of the world are a half day's walk apart at the MOST. Only in a few parts of the Americas and remote places settled in the modern era does the distance get wider - something a LOT of fantasy GMs fail to understand.)
I mean, maybe? They're certainly no worse about it than the developers, who frequently write about thriving isolated communities. In general, I've had the impression that the far off isolated places on Golarion were, simply, self-sufficient. Magical solutions that better enable such things to exist are also likely.
...even a minimally maxed out Gunslinger never missed.
"Minimally maxed out?" LOL. What does that even mean?
"Minimally maxed out?" LOL. What does that even mean?
I presume a guy who did not do the "take a 7 in CHA and INT to get a 20 in DEX!" thing, which was so common to 1E guide mentality, but rather started with a 16 in DEX and more rounded out stats in the other attributes.
I mean, maybe? They're certainly no worse about it than the developers, who frequently write about thriving isolated communities....people had to live no more than a day or two away from farms and supply networks. It's why towns and villages in most of the world are a half day's walk apart at the MOST. Only in a few parts of the Americas and remote places settled in the modern era does the distance get wider - something a LOT of fantasy GMs fail to understand.)
Yeah. This has been a pet peeve of mine with tRPGs and fantasy authors combined since I was old enough to know how agrarian societies work (somewhen in the 80s).
That gets us off topic - but in general you just can't have such a thing. You have towns that scrap buy waiting for the next stage coach - but they scrape by because they're surrounded by farms. And that itself was something that is mostly limited to the Americas where such communities were built along expected routes of growth.
A truly isolated community fails.
*****
Anyway, back to PF2E guns:
The more I read the PF2E rules, the more I like how they did these. They're weak in the hands of 'Daryll the peasant' and his cousin 'Daryll the Barbarian' as well as his other cousin 'Daryll the Rogue'... But in the hands of Bob the gunslinger - watch out.
It allows them to be put into the game without being an unbalancing agent. And that fits to my sense of how guns were at 'this tech level' historically. You needed a trained expert who also knew how to care for the weapon for it to be a 'game changer'.
The only non-historical aspect is the price of them is high. But this is needed for game balance.
I mean, maybe? They're certainly no worse about it than the developers, who frequently write about thriving isolated communities....people had to live no more than a day or two away from farms and supply networks. It's why towns and villages in most of the world are a half day's walk apart at the MOST. Only in a few parts of the Americas and remote places settled in the modern era does the distance get wider - something a LOT of fantasy GMs fail to understand.)
Yeah. This has been a pet peeve of mine with tRPGs and fantasy authors combined since I was old enough to know how agrarian societies work (somewhen in the 80s).
That gets us off topic - but in general you just can't have such a thing. You have towns that scrap buy waiting for the next stage coach - but they scrape by because they're surrounded by farms. And that itself was something that is mostly limited to the Americas where such communities were built along expected routes of growth.
A truly isolated community fails.
I ran into that when running Trail of the Hunted, 1st module in the Ironfang Invasion adventure path. The Ironfang Legion had invaded the village of Phaendar and the PCs had helped many villagers escape to hide in the dangerous Fangwood forest. The PCs had a meeting among the refugees to discuss what to do next. One person said they could travel 150 miles on the riverside trade route to the captial city Tamran, stopping at the tiny local villages along the way, such as Polebridge and Fishtown. The module intended for them to stay hidden in the forest and had left out nearby villages, but no, I wanted to be realistic and invented names.
This came back to bite and reward me later. After finding a safe hideout for the refugees, the PCs realized they were close to Polebridge and went to check on that village. In 10 minutes midgame I bought a village map from 2Minute Tabletop and threw together an adventure there. The Ironfang Legion had conquered Polebridge, too. An Ironfang garrison maintaining a roadblock to prevent travelers from informing the nation of their invasion. I let the PCs track down a family hiding in a cave. Then the party used their 4th-level stealth and archery skills to destroy the garrison. The players had lots of fun against a challenge that on paper was twice as strong as them but caught by surprise.
Anyway, back to PF2E guns:
My wife played a PF1 dwarven gunslinger with the Experimental Gunsmith archetype in my Iron Gods campaign. She wanted to play a gadgeteer who would master the alien high technology found scattered around Numeria, and Experimental Gunsmith tinkering was the closest we could find to gadgeteering at 1st level.
So I read discussions about gunslingers in this Paizo forum. A lot of build optimizers where using Gunslinger abilities and every trick for quick reloading to get free-action reloads on their firearms in order to shoot as fast as an archer. They wanted to hit touch AC and gain Dexterity to damage at 5th level while otherwise treating a firearm as a longbow. After 5th level, they switched to another class.
In contrast, my wife had made a grappling gun with Experimental Gunsmith and later upgraded to an alien autograpnel. She played a non-magical battlefield controller (controls enemy actions to protect the party) with her ability to grapple at a distance and the 7th-level Targeting deed. Experimental Gunsmith archetype traded away the Gun Training that added a Dexterity bonus to firearm damage, but battlefield controllers don't need damage. She took feats, such as Craft Technological Items, to play with the alien technology, but stuck with gunslinger class.
I bragged about her build, because battlefield control is powerful and I had never seen a non-magical controller before. But the optimizers paid no attention. To them, gunslingers were all about rapid fire and massive damage. I found their tunnel vision boring.
The PF2 firearms are fairly mundane, lacking gamebreaking features to exploit. And that prevents the tunnel vision of seeing them only as a set of features to exploit for massive damage that seldom misses, and returns the flavor of them being firearms with a place in history. Hence, the title of this thread calls them "nerfed."
The problem is that balancing on price would have to mean you couldn't start with one at level 1. And it would be a question of "when can you afford to use them?". It's very hard to balance a weapon around price.
Honestly IMO they should have made firearms all simple (but rare) weapons and had to make them worse than martial ranged weapons or else the balance is broken in favor of something that isn't supposed to be common. And then you have issues where everyone is cheesing access to firearms because they want the better DPR weapon.
Honestly, someone was always going to be unhappy with how guns vs bows vs crossbow worked out.
The problem is that balancing on price would have to mean you couldn't start with one at level 1. And it would be a question of "when can you afford to use them?". It's very hard to balance a weapon around price.
Honestly IMO they should have made firearms all simple (but rare) weapons and had to make them worse than martial ranged weapons or else the balance is broken in favor of something that isn't supposed to be common. And then you have issues where everyone is cheesing access to firearms because they want the better DPR weapon.
Honestly, someone was always going to be unhappy with how guns vs bows vs crossbow worked out.
I thiiiiink the way balance works for gun prices is that you can afford one, maybe two, at level 1 but not more. If guns were as cheap as daggers, then at really low levels Quick Draw cycling through a brace of pistols would actually be kind of insane damage, and carrying different varieties would provide great versatility. (Like using a scatter gun against swarms, for example.) As is, by the time you can afford a bunch of guns you also are getting runes and need to pick one to invest in, or play within the constraints of blazons of shared power type things.
This play style works great with ABP.
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Honestly, someone was always going to be unhappy with how guns vs bows vs crossbow worked out.
That still feels like kind of a copout, though. No solution is going to be perfect but I don't see how that justifies a solution that just serves one group per se either.
Like how would a world where you can just make choices based on your aesthetic and mechanical preferences be a bad outcome here?
A world where it's just am aesthetic choice is fine. Sure, let's switch to all completely generic weapons. Simple weapons have X number of trait points, martial weapons get x + 2, and advanced weapons get X + 4. Damage is a trait, and you can just choose whatever trait you like for your weapons power budget and then you can pretend it's whatever you want.
To be honest, I like those kind of systems, especially when we don't have things like crit range. The custom weapon rules of PF1 were pretty terrible because people would just make high crit range reach weapons with no flavor because it was mechanically the best choice one could make for a melee weapon. Weapon dice didn't matter because you had so much other sources of damage.
In PF2, weapon dice matter. Crit range doesn't exist. As long as traits are given appropriate costs then this is reasonable. Now you can have your reload 0 firearm with a d6 damage and 60ft range and call it a pistol as a simple weapon (heck you might even afford another trait there). What I've just described is a short bow (mechanics) without propulsive or deadly (but it's also simple), but there is no reason IMO you can't pretend it's firearm of some sort.
The problem that creeps in is that the mechanics do need to be balanced against already existing mechanics.
And I don't think it's a cop out. The solution is no change. Everything works as it is, except people who want guns to be more of a thing are upset because they're not.
The only change I would make is to make all guns simple (but rare). Even if you get access to a rare firearm, the reload on them will make them worse than using a bow.
A world where it's just am aesthetic choice is fine. Sure, let's switch to all completely generic weapons. Simple weapons have X number of trait points, martial weapons get x + 2, and advanced weapons get X + 4. Damage is a trait, and you can just choose whatever trait you like for your weapons power budget and then you can pretend it's whatever you want.
Having systems on top of systems on top of systems (too much layerd complexity in other words) not only increases the chances that someone makes a mistake and gets the math wrong, it's intimidating to new players coming into the hobby.
Much better to keep it simple and say "pick a weapon from this list" I'd think. It also keeps things consistent in terms of "Player A's longsword functions similarly to Player B's longsword."
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A world where it's just am aesthetic choice is fine. Sure, let's switch to all completely generic weapons. Simple weapons have X number of trait points, martial weapons get x + 2, and advanced weapons get X + 4. Damage is a trait, and you can just choose whatever trait you like for your weapons power budget and then you can pretend it's whatever you want.Having systems on top of systems on top of systems (too much layerd complexity in other words) not only increases the chances that someone makes a mistake and gets the math wrong, it's intimidating to new players coming into the hobby.
Much better to keep it simple and say "pick a weapon from this list" I'd think. It also keeps things consistent in terms of "Player A's longsword functions similarly to Player B's longsword."
That's not... Reaaaaally true though. I say this as someone who likes PF2 weapon traits generally and likes reload weapons a lot specifically. "Pick your traits" isn't really more complicated than "pick a weapon which has traits" once you start playing. It does add some cognitive load to character creation,* but at least that way you're more likely to learn your traits and what they do. PF2 weapons, you can pick something you like the idea of and then have no idea what your traits do. Which is fine for a longsword, but caused problems when you have agile, forceful, deadly, fatal, or whatever.
*You can also get around the character creation cognitive load by having classes that don't have to make this decision. In Dungeon World, Fighters get to design their own weapon and choose its traits, but barbarians simply add Forceful and Messy to any weapon they wield. (I feel like barbarians in any version of Pathfinder or D&D aren't as simple mechanicall as their concept implies. They always have resource pools to manage or math shifting abilities or both. The Dungeon World barbarian actually feels like a simpler fighter, which is cool.)
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A world where it's just am aesthetic choice is fine. Sure, let's switch to all completely generic weapons. Simple weapons have X number of trait points, martial weapons get x + 2, and advanced weapons get X + 4. Damage is a trait, and you can just choose whatever trait you like for your weapons power budget and then you can pretend it's whatever you want.Having systems on top of systems on top of systems (too much layerd complexity in other words) not only increases the chances that someone makes a mistake and gets the math wrong, it's intimidating to new players coming into the hobby.
Much better to keep it simple and say "pick a weapon from this list" I'd think. It also keeps things consistent in terms of "Player A's longsword functions similarly to Player B's longsword."
I will agree the initial load to understand and "build" the weapon for a new player would be a little intimidating, but I don't think it's too bad. Besides, you could have a list of pre-built examples to allow people to select something without thinking of how to build it or describe what it is. And once you get through the initial building phase of the character, there is no increased load.
I don't think weapons from one player to another being consistent is a big deal to be honest.
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It would certainly make a good supplemental rule option.
The only issue with "build a weapon" is feat trees that require a specific weapon. But one could argue that those could be made to focus around select weapon traits instead.
Or again, you have a list of weapons built using the system (as examples) and they can be pre-configured so that designers know the archetypes works with them. Aldori dueling sword is one such example I can think of, although that not so much a feat tree. In fact I'm not sure there are "feat" trees that function on a specific weapon like there were in PF1, but rather archetypes that get benefits when using certain weapons. Although there are probably examples of the other I'm not aware of. And depending on how you want to define "feat tree" you could argue that since you're spending class feats on something that only functions when wielding a weapon that it's still a feat tree. Personally I think it's different, especially compared to how things functioned in PF1, but I understand the point you're making.
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If anyone is interested, the 'alchemical cartridges' that made PF1 Gunslingers possible have their real-life equivalent in the "Dreyse needle gun". The "first breech-loading rifle to use a bolt action to open and close the chamber".
Not only did it allow a soldier to reload much faster, it also allowed him to do that while lying down, whereas a musket needed to be reloaded with 'gravity assist', meaning you had to at least be kneeling to pour your gunpowder down the muzzle to reload. Not a problem behind fortifications, big problem when out in the open.
So PF2 muskets having a reload of 1 (representing about 2 real world seconds) is a bit silly. They should have gone with 'alchemical cartridges' again IMO, especially seeing that firearm ammunition is already described as "typically a prepackaged paper cartridge, including wadding, bullet, and black powder,..."
But hey, whatever.
Pathfinder muskets are in my hrlead already breach loaders, makes the whole Setup more realistic Action Economy wise
I mean, crossbows also took a long time to reload. Like, not compatible with normal Pathfinder combats long time. Especially when a round is measure in 6 seconds. Heck even drawing a arrow and firing a bow multiple times in 6 seconds seems challenging. Especially if someone is charging up on you and you're trying to move. The game sacrifices realism in favor of making a playable and balanced game.
The problem being that simple weapons need to be worse than martial weapons, which should in theory be worse than advanced weapons (although advanced weapons are rarely worth picking up).