I mean, the rules assume Golarion and Pharasma is one of the most important (and likely most powerful) entities in the universe that contains Golarion and is central to the fundamental mystery of the Pathfinder setting (the Omens getting Lost after Aroden shuffled off the mortal coil.)
If you are homebrewing a setting that doesn't have any of this, you can just put Law and Chaos back in it. But Pharasma's a really important figure in Golarion, definitely a "top 3 most important deity, along with the two main cosmic Big Bads."
Sounds overblown to me. Where's Not-Tom-Bombadil when you need them?I mean, the rules assume Golarion and Pharasma is one of the most important (and likely most powerful) entities in the universe that contains Golarion and is central to the fundamental mystery of the Pathfinder setting (the Omens getting Lost after Aroden shuffled off the mortal coil.)
If you are homebrewing a setting that doesn't have any of this, you can just put Law and Chaos back in it. But Pharasma's a really important figure in Golarion, definitely a "top 3 most important deity, along with the two main cosmic Big Bads."
You asked somebody to explain their own ideas why the Lost Omens setting doesn't place as much importance on law vs chaos as good vs evil. If that explanation doesn't fit your world which you created, well surely if you been at this task for any amount of time, you're used to needing to modify the bade assumptions of the game mechanics to suit elements that do or don't apply to your homebrew?
This is not a dismissal of homebrew worlds--i have engaged in that activity on more than one occasion--but the Age of Lost Omens is the setting that the PF2 rules are made to model. It's only natural any given homebrew world will have to make some adjustment.
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What story can you not tell again? I mean some of the ones involving specific creatures that just can't remain in the game anymore, but cosmologically, your stories can still happen in any of the planes or involving any philosophical conflicts.
There are some stories that Paizo isn't particularly interested in telling, and they're really obligated to enable those stories in case someone else wants to.
Like if you want to use a completely different cosmology where the eventual triumph of chaos is not the inevitable fate of the universe, it shouldn't be that hard to just copy/paste the holy/unholy rules for spirit damage to create an order/entropy dynamic.
It's just that the Golarion cosmology is one where the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applies, and eventually (over the course of trillions of years) the Maelstrom will consume the universe and the lone survivor of this universe is going to author the next one, and this is not a threat you fight but more an ending you delay by building.
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It has been stressed a number of times that the story hasn't changed, only the clunky mechanics.
"Your books are still valid, but if they aren't, it's good actually and the things you like are stupid and deserved to get culled" is not going to win over people who were perfectly happy with Pathfinder 2.0
PF2 is an existing product. You can use all the material you want out of it for your own games. What is changing going forward is stuff that had to change, as well as stuff the developers are telling us now they were never really going to develop more in the same way.
So if the stuff you like is underutilized stuff that is getting removed, it is them telling you you were just going to be sitting frustrated for the rest of the game cycle because those elements weren’t the direction the game is headed. If they were elements that would have got the company sued, than they were going to end the game anyway.
"Your books are still valid, but if they aren't, it's good actually and the things you like are stupid and deserved to get culled" is not going to win over people who were perfectly happy with Pathfinder 2.0It has been stressed a number of times that the story hasn't changed, only the clunky mechanics.
I mean, if you felt that a set of creatures which could not be killed or incapacitated except by one of the rarest damage types in the game was an ideal state of affairs, your assessment may ultimately be correct.
I'm merely attempting to be accurate and clear about what has actually been said by designers and lore teams amid more impassioned but not fully informed takes on the subject. If that offends you, there's nothing I can do about that.
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There are some stories that Paizo isn't particularly interested in telling, and they're not really obligated to enable those stories in case someone else wants to.
I hate when I forget the key logical connective and don't notice it until the edit window is closed.
But what narratively about the canon of the planes is actually changing? Some creatures that just can’t be used any more. They are not retriactively disappearing, just not going to be a part of future stories. Otherwise “these creatures do a tiny bit more damage to each other” is not really a narrative shift.
The schools of magic are the only really narratively different thing to be going, and again that is 100% by legal necessity for the game to continue to exist. They had gotten smaller and smaller in relevance too, so holding on to PF1 narrative was projecting way too far backward to be relevant to the future of the game.
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The entire "you can play the same stories" is now a rug pull because we fundamentally cannot tell the same stories.
What story specifically can't you tell anymore?
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Temprans is upset because PF1 narratives that they were interested in being told never fully came over to PF2 they way they had hoped, and the remaster is pretty squarely shutting the door in the possibility they ever will.
It is a fair thing to be disappointed about, but it is confusing when you are holding PF2 remastered up all the way back to PF1, and not at all acknowledging the legal position that Paizo feels is necessarily the underpinning of all of this.
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Any story where you gain power from law/chaos to fight the other. Any story where you work with the forces of Law/Chaos to fight against the other. Any story where you have to deal with that struggle.The entire "you can play the same stories" is now a rug pull because we fundamentally cannot tell the same stories.What story specifically can't you tell anymore?
Why can't you tell those stories anymore?
The law/Chaos axis was incredibly underdeveloped in PF2 and was more of a false flag to mislead players than an integral part of the game that was ever going to be used in the system again. Everything about that can still be used in your own home games (where hopefully it would not be a false flag) all you want. The material is already published. It wasn’t moving forward anyway, so that situation is exactly the same. Alignment was going out of the system from the start of the whole situation over the OLG and so the things in world you could effect with law energy or chaos energy was going to be insignificantly small and not at all useful for defining what makes Hellknights Hellknights or the other aspects of the narrative that are necessary for those stories to work.
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I am talking about lore that was a thing in PF2 up until now. Don't you dare try to straw man me.Temprans is upset because PF1 narratives that they were interested in being told never fully came over to PF2 they way they had hoped, and the remaster is pretty squarely shutting the door in the possibility they ever will.
It is a fair thing to be disappointed about, but it is confusing when you are holding PF2 remastered up all the way back to PF1, and not at all acknowledging the legal position that Paizo feels is necessarily the underpinning of all of this.
I am not trying to bait you or make you upset, but I do want to point out that when you say:
We are not talking about some random home game. We are talking about the canon that has been a thing for 15+ years just banishing because they don't want to tell those stories anymore.
It would be very easy to assume that you were talking about PF1 canon and PF1 stories because PF2 didn't exist then.
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If you go back and listen to the stream where they talked about this in PaizoCon, you'll hear that they mentioned that they went back and looked at all "Law vs. Chaos" conflicts in Pathfinder published adventures, and realized that these almost always also mapped onto "Good vs. Evil".
So you'd have Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Evil (e.g. Hell's Rebels) or Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil (e.g. Wrath of the Righteous), but they basically never did any of LG vs. CG, LN vs. CN, or LE vs. CE.
If Paizo spent 15 years publishing adventures and never considered a specific conflict especially important, it might not be especially important to the kinds of stories they want to write.
PF2 specifically said everything is cannon. You saying "oh he is talking about PF1" is literally saying "nothing before 2020 matters and should not be considered canon".I am talking about lore that was a thing in PF2 up until now. Don't you dare try to straw man me.Temprans is upset because PF1 narratives that they were interested in being told never fully came over to PF2 they way they had hoped, and the remaster is pretty squarely shutting the door in the possibility they ever will.
It is a fair thing to be disappointed about, but it is confusing when you are holding PF2 remastered up all the way back to PF1, and not at all acknowledging the legal position that Paizo feels is necessarily the underpinning of all of this.
I am not trying to bait you or make you upset, but I do want to point out that when you say:
We are not talking about some random home game. We are talking about the canon that has been a thing for 15+ years just banishing because they don't want to tell those stories anymore.It would be very easy to assume that you were talking about PF1 canon and PF1 stories because PF2 didn't exist then.
Do you have a source for "everything is cannon"? I feel like, we are not throwing out the old lore, but we are not beholden to make it a fundamental universal truth that we cannot ever change is a misrepresentation of Paizo's intention. I think it is a misrepresentation of their intentions from the beginning of PF2, but it is certainly not something they are holding themselves to with a remastery project that is first and foremost based on "we have to stop using a certain set of material and ideas about our world that we didn't really create, and we know that we borrowed them from someone that isn't very happy about sharing anymore."
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If you go back and listen to the stream where they talked about this in PaizoCon, you'll hear that they mentioned that they went back and looked at all "Law vs. Chaos" conflicts in Pathfinder published adventures, and realized that these almost always also mapped onto "Good vs. Evil".
So you'd have Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Evil (e.g. Hell's Rebels) or Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil (e.g. Wrath of the Righteous), but they basically never did any of LG vs. CG, LN vs. CN, or LE vs. CE.
If Paizo spent 15 years publishing adventures and never considered a specific conflict especially important, it might not be especially important to the kinds of stories they want to write.
IIRC, as far as the Evil side is concerned, it was a deliberate decision at the time to avoid doing something similar to what DnD had been doing at that time with a strong war between Devils and Demons.
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Something that people might want to keep in mind is that AFAIK Paizo never said before this that they were not interested in developping the Law vs Chaos axis. I believe this is the first time I see anything on this topic. So, yes, it is natural that people would be surprised and even upset.
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TBH, this seems like a new take on the setting, which for many will equate to a new similar but different setting.
This happened too with the passage from PF1 to PF2, for example with the customized (and often more restricted) alignments for deities' Clerics.
But we are so focused on all the many great changes in the mechanics that we tend to not really pay attention to the impact they will have on the stories we will tell in the setting in the following years.
Just like I saw PF2 Golarion as different in key points (to me at least) from PF1 Golarion, I now see Remastered Golarion as different from PF2 Golarion. We sure will be living in interesting times in the following years and I greatly look forward to where Paizo's innovative authors will take us, and Golarion with us.
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Paizo and the staff are very different now from what they were in the beginning and I feel they are just starting to leverage the awesome openness and inclusivity that Paizo provides to come into their own power and make both setting and game the ones for which they have both great freedom and great ambitions while staying within the legacy of what has already been established.
So, yes things do change and topics that might have been important in the setting, and for us, years ago might fade away to make place for new exciting, and previously underdeveloped, stories.
We'll see and discover.
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Do you have a source for "everything is cannon"?PF2 specifically said everything is cannon. You saying "oh he is talking about PF1" is literally saying "nothing before 2020 matters and should not be considered canon".I am talking about lore that was a thing in PF2 up until now. Don't you dare try to straw man me.Temprans is upset because PF1 narratives that they were interested in being told never fully came over to PF2 they way they had hoped, and the remaster is pretty squarely shutting the door in the possibility they ever will.
It is a fair thing to be disappointed about, but it is confusing when you are holding PF2 remastered up all the way back to PF1, and not at all acknowledging the legal position that Paizo feels is necessarily the underpinning of all of this.
I am not trying to bait you or make you upset, but I do want to point out that when you say:
We are not talking about some random home game. We are talking about the canon that has been a thing for 15+ years just banishing because they don't want to tell those stories anymore.It would be very easy to assume that you were talking about PF1 canon and PF1 stories because PF2 didn't exist then.
To be fair to Temperans, their argument is most likely intended to reference the idea that even though the mechanics of the game may have gotten an update in the move to 2e, players would still be able to tell the same kinds of stories. Unfortunately, Temperans often seems to interpret mechanics somewhat literally, and objects even when an aspect of the lore is updated with a deeper and richer context and understanding.
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My very real fear now is that Champions will need to be aligned with Holy or Unholy. And that just like we never got Neutral Champions, there will never be unaligned Champions.
A reasonable assumption, but I don't think they'll go that way. From what I've seen/heard so far, sanctification is entirely dependent on your god. Some require it, some allow it and some presumably disallow it. It would be weird for a character to need to be sanctified when they are worshiping someone who has no stake in that particular fight. The cleric at least doesn't seem to inherently require it. I think at most certain feats might require it, but I'm not sure they'll even go that far. If anything, this will be an opportunity for champion causes beyond even neutral champions.
I think Hellknights are going to be in a much better space as a result of switching from alignment to mechanical connections to one’s edicts and anathema. If someone breaks the law, that doesn’t need to be contextualized within a complex web of alignment conflicts anymore. It can be a paladin using lay on hands to save a life in the nation of Geb, or a creature hunting for food in a forest claimed by an unrecognized but codified authority as private or state property, or a horribly intentioned serial killer…it is breaking the local law. This will allow much more specificity and less table-side arguments about a made up system for moralizing player behaviors.
I also see how it could have been better to do the same with “good vs evil” but if you listen to James Case and Michael Sayre talk about “sanctified and unholy” it really sounds less like a purely motivational force and more like the kind of cosmic faith war, of which is incredibly prevalent in human story telling, and has been for hundreds if not thousands of years. As deeply invested as I personally am professionally in discussing and questioning the social vs individual value of ideas like property, contracts, and the power of language, I don’t feel like “+5 damage to people who disagree with me” was ever necessary to explore those themes, and many of those themes are too complex to explore easily in game that more than half my friends play to bop spooky scary things and have fun.
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Good and evil tropes are boring to me. I personally would have not kept holy/unholy if I was making a game for me and my friends. Paizo has been using Good vs Evil often in their story telling and many of those stories are incredibly popular. Removing them is not necessary to further separate the game from D&D and no one writing a book or making a movie about cosmological battles between good and evil is going to get sued for IP infringement.
No one aligning their entire game/story around chaos vs law would either, but having both together, in a cosmological relevant grid, well, suddenly that is sounding debatable. It seems pretty obvious which of the axes was gettig cut and which Paizo would try to hold on to.
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Removed some harassing posts. Feel free to disagree but do it respectfully please.
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The conflict is what made Hellknights interesting. They cared about their law not your law, which is why so many ended up being evil or neutral. This change doesn't make them any better, just abunch of mercenaries...
This is an interesting read on Hellknights. I am guessing by “their law” you mean the oath and measure? Because my read on Hellknights is that they very much respect THE LAW, which ever law that was unless it conflicted with their hierarchy of higher laws. I think edicts and anathema work much better for defining these nuances and specificities than cosmic beings if law and chaos.
IIRC, as far as the Evil side is concerned, it was a deliberate decision at the time to avoid doing something similar to what DnD had been doing at that time with a strong war between Devils and Demons.If you go back and listen to the stream where they talked about this in PaizoCon, you'll hear that they mentioned that they went back and looked at all "Law vs. Chaos" conflicts in Pathfinder published adventures, and realized that these almost always also mapped onto "Good vs. Evil".
So you'd have Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Evil (e.g. Hell's Rebels) or Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil (e.g. Wrath of the Righteous), but they basically never did any of LG vs. CG, LN vs. CN, or LE vs. CE.
If Paizo spent 15 years publishing adventures and never considered a specific conflict especially important, it might not be especially important to the kinds of stories they want to write.
I'm not sure anything particularly interesting was ever done with "The Blood War" so this isn't a huge loss.
Plus the Pathfinder setting is sort of incompatible with the premise since the two Big Bads of the setting are Rovagug (who is caged) and Asmodeus (who was instrumental in his confinement.) Asmodeus is unlikely to want to have anything else to do with the Rough Beast (until he inevitably gets out, I guess) and the fact that the main enemy of Demons are Qlippoths who just want mortal life to go away entirely is kind of more interesting to me. Like arguably one of the reasons that "Order" exists in the first place is that the Proteans were too busy fighting the Qlippoths to do anything about it.
This is an interesting read on Hellknights. I am guessing by “their law” you mean the oath and measure? Because my read on Hellknights is that they very much respect THE LAW, which ever law that was unless it conflicted with their hierarchy of higher laws. I think edicts and anathema work much better for defining these nuances and specificities than cosmic beings if law and chaos.
IMO, the most interesting way you could structure a "the PCs are Hellknights" adventure is send them far afield to several where "the law" is drastically different from that of Cheliax, but is still something the PCs are obligated to respect (Druma, Rahadoum, Andoran, Thuvia, Mzali, etc.) lest they violate their own oaths.
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I'm glad this one is going away...
What is "law vs chaos" in a game where the powers in control are corrupt, or local law has broken down, or a revolution has just changed everything?
Is a 'law' type character bound by the laws of the nation, the laws of their ethics / vows / ideals / etc, or what?
Does a 'Chaotic' sort immediately try to overthrow the system they just created after winning a revolution? Consider the new Firebrands book - all those people that just overthrew a colonialist government, now have to toppled themselves because 'chaos'?
Replacing it with just edicts and anathema starts to make a whole lot more sense when you apply actual scenarios to it. People are bound by their causes and their factional loyalties. Whether someone is 'law and order' or 'agent of chaos' depends on who's winning today vs yesterday.
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I'm glad this one is going away...
What is "law vs chaos" in a game where the powers in control are corrupt, or local law has broken down, or a revolution has just changed everything?
Is a 'law' type character bound by the laws of the nation, the laws of their ethics / vows / ideals / etc, or what?
Does a 'Chaotic' sort immediately try to overthrow the system they just created after winning a revolution? Consider the new Firebrands book - all those people that just overthrew a colonialist government, now have to toppled themselves because 'chaos'?
Replacing it with just edicts and anathema starts to make a whole lot more sense when you apply actual scenarios to it. People are bound by their causes and their factional loyalties. Whether someone is 'law and order' or 'agent of chaos' depends on who's winning today vs yesterday.
TBT in a fantasy setting, no more than Good vs Evil.
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Chaos and Law were really easy for me thanks to my experience living in RL Japan.
In short, how do you react when someone who is considered a legitimate authority in your culture tells you what to do ?
Lawful tends to obey.
Chaotic tends to rebel.
Neutral can go either way.
But all those are a thing of the past now.
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Another approach I used was how does one feel about the system ?
Lawful tends to trust and uphold it. They see the system as the good way to get what they pursue.
Chaotic tends to mistrust and fight it. They see the system as an obstacle, or a threat, to getting what they pursue.
Neutral does not care one way or the other.
