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The entire premise of a game like this is "rolling dice is fun when you care about the outcome". Fireball would be better if it was 2d6+24, but it would absolutely be less fun.Hard disagree. The game is more fun when your actions feel like they matter and planning the perfect ambush on a group of enemies only to roll 1s and 2s on your Fireball and also find out that half the group made their saves feels terrible. There's a reason why the PF1 blasters always made use of maximize spells and would often prefer to cast a spell of a lower level maximized than take a risk on a higher level spell that could whiff.
Also, if this supposition of yours is true, why don't we see martial characters starting with 2dx and no modifiers to their damage? Why is it fine for a fighter to get inevitability but not a caster?
People absolutely love rolling moar dice over rolling 1d10+45. This is why PF2 martial damage bumps from runes come in dice, and why Power Attack is "roll more dice", not "add a static number" like PF1 was.
The number of people who are on the spectrum/invested in the math deep enough to analyse the minutae of dice and the RNG of what they do < the number of people who are giddy to roll more dice.
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Do you have numbers to back that hypothesis up? Ibwould argue people value consistency and reliability more than randomness. You don't see many people buying products that work awesomely half the time over something that works as intended.
In fact many psychologists would argue people prefer consistency over randomness and only luke randomness when the pay off is huge. The pay off for spells is not disproportionately large enough to lose consisyency and the idea your limited resource will pay off.
Too many fallacies in Paizo designers logic around prepared casters always having the right tool available all the time with a super limited number of spots.
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People absolutely love rolling moar dice over rolling 1d10+45.
The 40k community has to keep pushing back against GW putting in ever more dice edition after edition because it isn't fun. The old 3.x Epic Level Handbook outright suggested using average damage because the designers knew that rolling 20d6 - 40d6 round after round would get terribly tedious in short order.
This is why PF2 martial damage bumps from runes come in dice, and why Power Attack is "roll more dice", not "add a static number" like PF1 was.
Give me the flat boosts. I'd much rather get a sword that gets +[average value of extra weapon dice rounded down] at odd levels of extra dice and +[average damage of extra weapon dice] at even levels. I also always took average HP per level when rolling for HP used to be a thing.
There's also the fact that this design trend runs counter to how people actually played the classes back when you could build around maximized spells and high static damage modifiers. When given the option it was clear that the community always went for as sure a thing as they could have the system give them and ignored feats/spells that were higher risk even if they did offer the potential for higher rewards.
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It also doesn't thematically make sense that the class known for their careful study and planning to have such swingy effects be the core of their spellcasting. You'd think Wizards would be constantly refining their spells to be ever less and less variable and have such damage and effect fixing be core to their class identity. Sorcerers should be the class that gets unstable versions of Wizard spells with less fixed damage and the potential for both high and low rolls.
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People absolutely love rolling moar dice over rolling 1d10+45.The 40k community has to keep pushing back against GW putting in ever more dice edition after edition because it isn't fun. The old 3.x Epic Level Handbook outright suggested using average damage because the designers knew that rolling 20d6 - 40d6 round after round would get terribly tedious in short order.
This is why PF2 martial damage bumps from runes come in dice, and why Power Attack is "roll more dice", not "add a static number" like PF1 was.Give me the flat boosts. I'd much rather get a sword that gets +[average value of extra weapon dice rounded down] at odd levels of extra dice and +[average damage of extra weapon dice] at even levels. I also always took average HP per level when rolling for HP used to be a thing.
There's also the fact that this design trend runs counter to how people actually played the classes back when you could build around maximized spells and high static damage modifiers. When given the option it was clear that the community always went for as sure a thing as they could have the system give them and ignored feats/spells that were higher risk even if they did offer the potential for higher rewards.
Miniatures wargames aren't TTRPGs. Minfig gamers will want to finish the battle in a reasonable time, because it's already a time hog complete with setting minis/terrain up and tearing it all down, and leaving your precious painted minis at the store/con/tourney/random dude's house isn't an option. So, everything that's tedious/time consuinmg is actively counter to what they're after. TTRPGs are much more relaxed in that regard, doubly so now that so many people play them via VTTs.
I see that you're an invested optimiser and that's fine, but you have to realise that you're in a rather small minority of people who play the game. Out of 20 PF players that I game on a regular basis, one person, maybe two is invested in the crunch to a nearly comparable degree. The rest just likes rolling a lot of dice.
[Y]ou have to realise that you're in a rather small minority of people who play the game. Out of 20 PF players that I game on a regular basis, one person, maybe two is invested in the crunch to a nearly comparable degree. The rest just likes rolling a lot of dice.
Prove it.
We saw that when given a chance the PF1 community absolutely valued fixed bonuses over pretty much everything else. Casters rushed to get maximize spell. Melee martials rushed to get Power Attack. If it offered a fixed bonus that wasn't laughably under tuned or over-specialized players took it. The draw to this optimization was so strong that PF2 had to be specifically designed to force players into taking skill feats and that feats in generally had to be crafted to avoid giving fixed bonuses less they be taken over all other options.
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I don't think it has anything to do with being an optimizer. The casual players in my groups feel really bad when they roll a bunch of 1s too... and I've never seen the barbarian player get upset she's rolling 2d12+16 instead of 8d6.
Do you have any studies pointing to how the average TTRPG player views dice rolling?
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Sorry no time to math while the women’s World Cup is on.
People like second edition. It is massively popular. One of the key differences? Dice matter. It was a very intentional game decision. The Barbarian is the only one getting over a +10 with static bonuses to damage with regularity. The fighter eventually gets there, but it is eventually. It does not require studies to confirm what the game design intention is.
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Sorry no time to math while the women’s World Cup is on.
People like second edition. It is massively popular. One of the key differences? Dice matter. It was a very intentional game decision. The Barbarian is the only one getting over a +10 with static bonuses to damage with regularity. The fighter eventually gets there, but it is eventually. It does not require studies to confirm what the game design intention is.
It wasn't a question of design intention but whether it was good or even largely enjoyable design. Finish watching the world cup then take time to read before jumping to assumptions what people are discussing.
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Sorry no time to math while the women’s World Cup is on.
People like second edition. It is massively popular. One of the key differences? Dice matter. It was a very intentional game decision. The Barbarian is the only one getting over a +10 with static bonuses to damage with regularity. The fighter eventually gets there, but it is eventually. It does not require studies to confirm what the game design intention is.
PF2 is popular because it is balanced, not because it is a better coinflip simulator than its competitors. PF2 would likely be as successful if many of those bonus dice were converted to some average value of flat damage.
Also, if random is desirable why do we no longer roll for stats or roll for HP at each level? Why do martial characters add a stat modifier to their damage instead of simply doubling up on weapon damage dice at level 1? Heck, if we wanted the dice to matter why have modifiers to rolls at all when we could set threshold values that simply set certain actions at a fixed probability of success and balance the game from there?
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[Y]ou have to realise that you're in a rather small minority of people who play the game. Out of 20 PF players that I game on a regular basis, one person, maybe two is invested in the crunch to a nearly comparable degree. The rest just likes rolling a lot of dice.Prove it.
We saw that when given a chance the PF1 community absolutely valued fixed bonuses over pretty much everything else. Casters rushed to get maximize spell. Melee martials rushed to get Power Attack. If it offered a fixed bonus that wasn't laughably under tuned or over-specialized players took it. The draw to this optimization was so strong that PF2 had to be specifically designed to force players into taking skill feats and that feats in generally had to be crafted to avoid giving fixed bonuses less they be taken over all other options.
What, are you asking me to produce written statements by my gaming group about their preferences? Sure, will carrion pigeon be OK or do I have to send them by fax?
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Because rolling the dice for an event that is happening right now is fun. Rolling the dice for things that will affect every other aspect of your play experience with that character are not.
There are diceless RPGs if you want a game of pure consistency. For some reason, they never seem all that popular.
What, are you asking me to produce written statements by my gaming group about their preferences? Sure, will carrion pigeon be OK or do I have to send them by fax?
You made a general claim when you said, "People absolutely love rolling moar dice." This flies in the face of what we see proven time and time again in studies of human psychology and also goes against how people played when the option to build for higher baseline numbers was present. Such being the case, I would like you to offer evidence that your claim is valid for a significant section of PF2's player cohort.
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The entire premise of a game like this is "rolling dice is fun when you care about the outcome". Fireball would be better if it was 2d6+24, but it would absolutely be less fun.Hard disagree. The game is more fun when your actions feel like they matter and planning the perfect ambush on a group of enemies only to roll 1s and 2s on your Fireball and also find out that half the group made their saves feels terrible. There's a reason why the PF1 blasters always made use of maximize spells and would often prefer to cast a spell of a lower level maximized than take a risk on a higher level spell that could whiff.
Also, if this supposition of yours is true, why don't we see martial characters starting with 2dx and no modifiers to their damage? Why is it fine for a fighter to get inevitability but not a caster?
People absolutely love rolling moar dice over rolling 1d10+45. This is why PF2 martial damage bumps from runes come in dice, and why Power Attack is "roll more dice", not "add a static number" like PF1 was.
The number of people who are on the spectrum/invested in the math deep enough to analyse the minutae of dice and the RNG of what they do < the number of people who are giddy to roll more dice.
Gonna agree with the bag here. Power attack and cantrip spellstrike have been explained to me as less powerful than two fighter strikes.....and those people may be right but I don't care if they are because two fighter strikes aren't nearly as fun to me.
Because rolling the dice for an event that is happening right now is fun. Rolling the dice for things that will affect every other aspect of your play experience with that character are not.
There are diceless RPGs if you want a game of pure consistency. For some reason, they never seem all that popular.
Except that nobody has proposed removing dice from PF2, we're proposing that players would respond favorably to being given more options to reduce risk and assure a higher baseline expected value for their abilities. I would likely enjoy playing a blaster wizard more if I was allowed to take half the damage dice from each spell and replace them with the average of what they would normally roll. I'd even argue that this might make sense as an ability that a Battle Wizard might value as they can more easily plan around spells with less variable damage.
Gonna agree with the bag here. Power attack and cantrip spellstrike have been explained to me as less powerful than two fighter strikes.....and those people may be right but I don't care if they are because two fighter strikes aren't nearly as fun to me.
In PF2 power attack and two strikes both roll essentially the same dice, so that isn't even what we're talking about. We're saying that many players would trade the current version of power attack for the older version that served the same purpose by adding flat damage in exchange for lowering your chance to hit.
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What, are you asking me to produce written statements by my gaming group about their preferences? Sure, will carrion pigeon be OK or do I have to send them by fax?You made a general claim when you said, "People absolutely love rolling moar dice." This flies in the face of what we see proven time and time again in studies of human psychology and also goes against how people played when the option to build for higher baseline numbers was present. Such being the case, I would like you to offer evidence that your claim is valid for a significant section of PF2's player cohort.
Can you point me to those studies of human psychology?
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Stepping back a little. After see that the designers change the Divine Font to no more depend from Cha and to allow metal armors for druids potentially makes them also able to dump Dex (druids nows welcomes Sentinel Archetype and its heavy armors) this makes me believe that the Cantrip changes was basically a part of a general move from MAD. Because in fact this change in cantrip benefits Eldritch Archers and Magus that now can more easily dump their spellcasting attribute diminishing their MAD and this is not a consequence but the real intention behind the change.
So IMO the cantrip nerfs to spellcasters was more like a consequence than the main intention and probably the designers just think "OK lets remove this bonus and add an extra dice instead, this will diminish the AVG dmg a little for casters but will help the martial-casters to avoid the MAD".
About Wizard schools. My impression is that designers was just lazy. They needed to change how schools works to avoid any possible legal problems after abandon de OGL and just made the new schools a copy of bloodlines stat blocks with 18 spells instead of 9 nerfing the school wizards and knowing that if someone don't like it can simply change to School of Unified Magical Theory (Universalist) in trade of have 1 less top spell casting per day.
The main problem IMO is that the designers simply thinks that Wizards is already good as they are while ignores the vocal part of the community that disagree. Specially because those who disagree have other casters and kineticist to play instead.
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Changing the subject a bit. The thing that surprised me the most was the removal of Silent spell feat. This reinforce the theory that you no more need to "cast" your spells loudly is really no more needed. This with the boosts in how focus spells works indirectly hurts considerably the psychics that looses 2 of its differentials from other classes.
Sorry no time to math while the women’s World Cup is on.
??? All the time in the world between each exciting play.
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Stepping back a little. After saw that the designers change the Divine Font to no more depend from Cha and to allow metal armors for druids potentially makes them also able to dump Dex (druids nows welcomes Sentinel Archetype and its heavy armors) this makes me believe that the Cantrip changes was basically a part of a general move from MAD. Because in fact this change in cantrip benefits Eldritch Archers and Magus that now can more easily dump their spellcasting attribute diminishing their MAD and this is not a consequence but the real intention behind the change.
So IMO the cantrip nerfs to spellcasters was more like a consequence than the main intention and probably the designers just think "OK lets remove this bonus and add an extra dice instead, this will diminish the AVG dmg a little for casters but will help the martial-casters to avoid the MAD".
I feel like we should stop saying there was a cantrip nerf when so far we have:
3d4 60 foot range
2d4 30 foot range, 2d6 melee
Two 2d4 multitarget cantrips
The average single target baseline seems to be going up, not down. Produce Flame got buffed in its best use case relative to other cantrips. (Melee.) 2d4 only seems like the default for multitarget or cantrips with extra effects. (It sounds like Divine Lance may be going down to 2d4, but we don't know that for sure yet, nor do we know what else it got besides a massive usability boost from spiritual damage.)
What I think we can safely expect to be nerfed is Electric Arc, probably down to 2d4. I get that people would rather have seen other cantrips buffed than having the best one nerfed, but it doesn't sound like enormous, sweeping buffs were ever on the table here. Hopefully we will still have a single target, save based cantrip for 3d4, like Spout or Scatter Scree.
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I feel like if they were adding some cool new thing to wizards they would be advertising it, not turning it into some secret thing people need to treasure hunt for clues to.
Makes more sense imo to just assume this is what wizards look like.
You'd think so, but they also chose to highlight two of the worst familiar abilities (Rune and Winter) before showing us the full page of options which were way better. And in the preview James Cases pointed out Ceremonial Knife and the combination of Nails and Hair, rather than the much more significant Coven Spell or Spirit Familiar. I'm not sure how they are choosing what gets previewed but it definitely isn't by picking the most mechanically powerful options.
I ultimately agree that it probably is best not to get one's hopes up. If you're not happy with the wizard class now, I am leery you'll be happy with it after the remaster.
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The main problem IMO is that the designers simply thinks that Wizards is already good as they are while ignores the vocal part of the community that disagree. Specially because those who disagree have other casters and kineticist to play instead.
I love some genuine, open, honest, community engagement on how and why they think this though.
I feel like the “pls help wizards” crowd generally put forward actual arguments around the issues they have, but the response back is either silence or general comments which lack actual insight.
So if I’m wrong, I’d actually love to to know why. Because I just don’t see how I can be.
No amount of “play like this” resolves most of the core complaints, and “just play something else” isn’t actually an answer.
The asks for the Wizard have never been that large, but now it seems like the class is getting worse with no evident counterpoint.
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So this is actively removing options and choice.Except, if the remix is genuinely backwards compatible (and the signs so far indicate that it will be), the original-flavour Wizard is still right there, ready to be used if required. So this is an extra option layered on top of that, not a replacement.
At worst, you might want to assign the newer spells to appropriate old-schools, but even that is not strictly necessary.
Also yeah, what happened with you can tell the same stories and "this will be compatible with the regular core".AFAICT, what happened to it is that it is proceeding nicely!
The specialist wizard of basic PF2 can not use the spells of the remaster, as those spells lacks the schools tags to know which one are on the school. You can play a basic wizard with basic spells while the rest of people play Remaster? posibbly, but is quite weird, honestly.
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A point I don't think is talked about is how, with the new Wizard subclasses, you add one cantrip and one spell from your Curriculum every spell rank to your spellbook, whereas the original subclass only ever gave you a single 1st-rank spell. So, in addition to the 2 spells you gain every time you level up, you're also gaining a spell every 2 levels (up to spell rank 9) that's related to your subclass. That's 9 (8 different rank spells plus the cantrip, not counting the 1st-rank spell since you got that in the original subclasses) spells to add to your spellbook for free.
This pushes Wizards to be even more of the prepared Arcane spellcaster than they already were before. Less time and money spent learning your bread-and-butter spells. And it helps you can heighten the lower level spells into the higher level Curriculum slots, so if you don't want a spell, you can heighten a lower level one to something else.
Sorry for those who REALLY don't like these changes, but I'm okay with them. But I'm not okay with how some of y'all talk about the design team, attacking their character and making assumptions of their decisions. Might be a good idea to ease up on that if you want your complaints to be taken seriously.
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I did mention the additional splls known and they are a good addition, especially with some of them being uncommon. But ultimately, they save you about 1400 gp, which is less then 5% of wealth of a new 17th level character (with Magical Shorthand). Not nothing, but hardly a big saving grace.
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I did mention the additional splls known and they are a good addition, especially with some of them being uncommon. But ultimately, they save you about 1400 gp, which is less then 5% of wealth of a new 17th level character (with Magical Shorthand). Not nothing, but hardly a big saving grace.
Depends somewhat on the game. Being able to turn wealth into spells known relies a lot on GM fiat too. So even if it's not a huge W, making the baseline wizard have a slightly meatier spell selection is nice.
What would be the alternative here if they didn’t auto-add your curriculum spells to your spellbook? Restrict your list of available options AND make you pay to learn the only ones you could get?
I mean that's how schools work right now so yeah.
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What would be the alternative here if they didn’t auto-add your curriculum spells to your spellbook? Restrict your list of available options AND make you pay to learn the only ones you could get?I mean that's how schools work right now so yeah.
In the current version, I feel that with greatly higher capacity to fill your bonus slot with something from the appropriate school, even if it’s not your first choice, it would not be a fully dead slot.
Whereas if they didn’t auto-add these spell options, it could create situations where a slot might be literally unusable until you got into a town and had the chance to learn them, or some such.
Giving you the spells eliminates that possibility. Which is a good and sound choice.
So I’m very glad it’s there, but I feel something like that had to be included with such a restricted list.
The thing that surprised me the most was the removal of Silent spell feat. This reinforce the theory that you no more need to "cast" your spells loudly is really no more needed.Jason Bulmahn: "... the change is more of a presentational one. Because we still understand that you have to speak words and do handwavy stuff when you cast spells, so that's not really changing." https://youtu.be/0rD0kKi97kc?t=3659
So yes, speaking stays for most classes.
So why they remove the Silent Spell feat?
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So why they remove the Silent Spell feat?The thing that surprised me the most was the removal of Silent spell feat. This reinforce the theory that you no more need to "cast" your spells loudly is really no more needed.Jason Bulmahn: "... the change is more of a presentational one. Because we still understand that you have to speak words and do handwavy stuff when you cast spells, so that's not really changing." https://youtu.be/0rD0kKi97kc?t=3659
So yes, speaking stays for most classes.
The most obvious possibilities are that an ability which affects the way you cast magic being called "Silent Spell" too closely resembled the OGL metamagic feat (silly, but that's the same story for a lot of OGL stuff). Another answer that can double up with the previous is that maybe Silent Sprll is redundant when Conceal Spell is already a thing.
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It just occurred to me that the number of focus spells the Wizard currently has access to looks to be going down as well.
With 8 schools, and at 2 a school, plus 1 from Hand of the apprentice, there was a total of 17 focus spells for the Wizard.
Since we aren’t getting 8 replacement schools, and each school looks to still have 2 focus spells, it means some existing spells are getting removed.
From the Feat list above, we can see that hand of the apprentice is potentially gone.
Do we have a list of the other focus spells with the new schools?
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There's at least 6 new schools that have been shown or mentioned, plus the universalist one. If there's only two more unannounced, we'd already be back to where we started.
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Can you point me to those studies of human psychology?What, are you asking me to produce written statements by my gaming group about their preferences? Sure, will carrion pigeon be OK or do I have to send them by fax?You made a general claim when you said, "People absolutely love rolling moar dice." This flies in the face of what we see proven time and time again in studies of human psychology and also goes against how people played when the option to build for higher baseline numbers was present. Such being the case, I would like you to offer evidence that your claim is valid for a significant section of PF2's player cohort.
At a high level we can point to the prevalence of risk aversion among the general population:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)
This would predispose most people to want reliable lower variance abilities even if they don't offer the same reward. Example: Most people will reject an 85% chance to win $1000 if it is put up against a 100% chance to gain $800.
There is also negativity bias which shows that while we might revel in the rare cases when the dice spike in our favor most of us will more keenly feel the weight of the times when the dice run below average. It will make more people feel better more often to increase the floor and lower the ceiling on things like spell damage and expected odds of successfully landing all-or-nothing spells.
There don't appear to be many easily available studies that show a preference for or against variability in gaming specifically but we can look at how games are actually played. Whenever players are given a chance they vastly prefer to specialize and try to make imposing their will upon the game world as consistently viable as possible. This proved true in PF1 and proves true in PF2 albeit within much tighter confines. It also proves true with how players build in CRPGs based on TTRPGs which use essentially the same rulesets as the game they are based upon.
EDIT: I did find one poll with a very tiny sample size that shows how much randomness people find most desirable in a CRPG.
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/variance-in-damage.45801/
It suggests that people like enough randomness to not have a completely predictable outcome but with little enough variance that they can plan around expected outcomes with only the rare chance to being surprised one way or the other.
TLDR; People show time and time again that we mostly avoid risk as often as possible.
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Nothing was added to improve the wizard? Nothing we haven't seen? It's just change the name of the schools to curriculum, toss on some spells, and roll with it. Somewhat cheaper spells added to the spellbook?
Are the focus spells any better? Any other info?
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All was info we basically already had about Curriculum.
There's at least 6 new schools that have been shown or mentioned, plus the universalist one. If there's only two more unannounced, we'd already be back to where we started.
And more can be printed in the future.
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There's at least 6 new schools that have been shown or mentioned, plus the universalist one. If there's only two more unannounced, we'd already be back to where we started.What's the list? I only know about Boundaries, Ars Grammatica, Battle Magic, and Civic Engineering (plus Universalist).
We've also heard of Mentalism and Protean Form I believe. They were name dropped sometime a month back and are in the first couple pages of this thread alongside Battle and Civic