Me: "Woohoo! I finally got my copy of Rage of Elements! The kineticist is back, baby!"
GM: "What's a kineticist?"
Me: "Think of the elemental benders from the Avatar series. It was one of the most popular classes in 1st edition. I've not delved into the 2e version as yet, but I've been hearing good things all week."
GM: "Is it using those new rules you've been talking about? 'Cause if so, I'm not allowing it in my games. I won't be converting over."
Me: *Stares stunned at this unexpected proclamation*
For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends. What stands out to you as especially awesome? What are your reasons for playing the class? Why are you switching to the new remastered ruleset? What informed your decisions?
If this doesn't get resolved soon, it's the end. No new material will be accepted into our home games. That will doom us all to mediocrity and stagnation. It can't end that way. It just can't. Help, I beg thee.
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Does your GM have specific objections about the kineticist? Or just the remaster in general?
Is your GM aware that the kineticist is completely compatible with the normal rules and at most requires just translating some keywords (i.e. vitality = positive)?
I feel like you need to talk with your GM about what the actual hang ups here are, because that response is too vague to really address. That said I think it's worth hammering home that you don't really need to convert all that much, the Kineticist is fully functional right now. There's no secret remaster sauce you need.
As for "what are the reasons for playing this class/what's awesome" ... for me the kineticist does two things that PF2 (and tbh pf1) struggle with a lot: It lets you build a magical character who can just go. Your abilities are full blown magical effects but with no cap, no daily limits to juggle.
Second, it lets you play a magical character who is very tightly themed. If I build a metal kineticist, most or all of my abilities are going to be themed around manipulating metal. Vancian magic has too many gaps in it and has too many broad expectations forced upon the player to make that really feasible to the same degree if you're just playing a wizard or druid.
Wish you the best of luck either way, RD.
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I can't help ya there, mainly because we really still have no clue just how different the Remaster will be. They say it's not that big of a shift, not even a half-edition change but the things they've shown so far tend to be simultaneously be good and worthwhile changes but also stuff that DOES fundamentally change the game, hell, they're replacing ALL of the Classes other than Kineticist (as far as we know, for now... I have reservations that RoE had enough time in the same oven they were cooking the Remaster in and will need to be cannibalized later on like the CRB, APG and the other half-dozen mainline books we know are getting redone over the next few years likely with future PC3, PC4, and probably LOC1 and LOC2 etc).
I'm of two minds in it all. Improvements to the game are great but Paizo pretending "they're the same rules, it's the same game, trust us you can use all your old books" rings just about as true as when they said the same thing about using your 3.X books for PF1 which I tried and it was a SPECTACULAR failure though, in their favor all that did was cause us to just fully move to Pathfinder RPG because it WAS better but now... they're doing this with PF2 as a whole and that same kind of "old edition crust" from non Remaster books is absolutely a factor than I'm NOT looking forward to reliving. The Remaster is CERTAINLY more than what some around here have been pitching it to be as "simply rewording stuff and buffing just the weakest Focus Spells" and it's also less than I and many others had hoped in that it would fix some of the rough edges and vague weirdness that still exists due to not taking a hard line clear and distinct lines between narrative and rules text or adherence to strict consistent wording/phrasing of mechanical terms.
This said, I haven't read the Kin fully yet but from what I gather it seems to be pretty potent and flexible, remarkably so in fact, almost like it WAS fully baked with the Remaster in mind to be 100% compatible and due to that it is just... better ... than the existing PF2 content, mechanically, textually, and even probably from the in session "game-feel" perspective which if injected into a game with a Witch and Swashbuckler... it's probably going to outshine their peers.
I don't really blame them, you know, I want a new half edition, I do but I am VERY hesitant to believe it is at all wise to believe ANY company that pitches game system backward compatibility as a feature when they have already announced that basically everything they said is compatible is already in the pipeline to be changed, replaced, and improved.
As for convincing your GM... all my advice would be is to ask them kindly to read the Class when you can get a copy of the rules to them and have THEM determine if the grain of it goes against the kind of PF2 game they're already running and have input to muscle memory.
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Me: "Woohoo! I finally got my copy of Rage of Elements! The kineticist is back, baby!"
GM: "What's a kineticist?"
Me: "Think of the elemental benders from the Avatar series. It was one of the most popular classes in 1st edition. I've not delved into the 2e version as yet, but I've been hearing good things all week."
GM: "Is it using those new rules you've been talking about? 'Cause if so, I'm not allowing it in my games. I won't be converting over."
Me: *Stares stunned at this unexpected proclamation*
For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends. What stands out to you as especially awesome? What are your reasons for playing the class? Why are you switching to the new remastered ruleset? What informed your decisions?
If this doesn't get resolved soon, it's the end. No new material will be accepted into our home games. That will doom us all to mediocrity and stagnation. It can't end that way. It just can't. Help, I beg thee.
Isn't Rage of Elements made/published with the OGL (since it was announced prior to Paizo stating they're going forth with the ORC license), meaning it still uses the same terms and phrases as with the original PF2?
If it is, then I don't see why your GM is (or you, for that matter, are) making a big deal out of it, since it's not really using new rules, meaning the GMs complaints are non-existent. If it isn't, then I don't think it matters if this was the Kineticist or not, since as you state, no new material is being accepted, which means your GM is already resigning that anything related to PF2 post-remaster announcement is dead to them. It doesn't matter if they make an Inquisitor Doctrine for Clerics, it doesn't matter if they make Neutral-aligned Champions, etc. Because it's post-remaster, you're not getting anywhere regardless of what that content might be.
At which point, you should ask yourself if (and when) it is the time to pack up your dice and find a table elsewhere that isn't a stickler for using vintage rulesets, since Paizo has basically already announced that any future products they publish will not (and essentially cannot) use the OGL.
I personally will admit that it will take some time and effort adjusting for the setting in regards to the Planes and all of their denizens, since Paizo is required to make it vastly different from its existing canon for obvious reasons, but if the complaint is from a mechanics standpoint, then I just think they are being overly stubborn with something that shouldn't really be all that different from if it's converted or not.
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I have consumed most of RoE. I have yet to run across anything that cannot be played seamlessly with pf2.0. The differences thus far are words and names. (Vitality instead of positive energy, spell rank instead of spell level, etc..)
If you are going to pitch it, say that "from the GMs perspective, he will not even notice a difference because the player can easily change the difference in wording to match what the GM is familiar with."
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Isn't literally all the Remaster stuff in RoE just "we have adjusted to the new nomenclature"?
Like we say "universe" instead of "prime material plane" and "creation's forge" instead of "positive energy plane" and "reflex defense" instead of "reflex save" and "void resistance" instead of "negative resistance".
I think showing your GM the PDF (when it drops) that just explains those differences should help.
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For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends.
This feels like borderline baiting.
Like, seriously - how are we supposed to answer that when we don't have the people with the actual objections here to talk to. Are you expecting us to craft our own shadow opponents from our worst fears of what the critics are and then argue against that?
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I would say the first best step is probably waiting for august 3rd when the remaster change over preview thing pdf comes out with gencon
For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends.This feels like borderline baiting.
How so?
Are you expecting us to craft our own shadow opponents from our worst fears of what the critics are and then argue against that?
...yes.
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Does your GM have specific objections about the kineticist? Or just the remaster in general?
That is unclear to me at this time.
He seems to take issue with having to go through the work of "learning a new system" and said something about how "the 1e kineticist required a second kineticist to use some of their abilities and that, in practice, you pretty much never had two kineticists unless the GM was willing to bend over backwards and throw you a bone with an NPC twin--and that left a bad taste in his mouth" Or something. He also mentioned "witches and rituals." I think he might be confusing kineticists with hag covens and seemed to be under the impression that the 1e kineticists HAD to use Interweave Composite Blasts to use composite blasts at all, which killed the class in his mind before he could read more of it or realized that he misunderstood something fundamental. In any case, I've asked for clarification.
(Not kidding. He actually said those things, though I'm paraphrasing from memory.)
Wish you the best of luck either way, RD.
Thank you, Squiggit.
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You should probably Note that while the flavor is largely the same, the class is basically a different from what the kineticist in 1e was
Just like you can barely compare 1e and 2e Magus or Paladin/Champion
They build the class around their own very well balanced Rule system
But from what you Tell your GM seems to be really confused in General
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The differences thus far are words and names.
LOL Since the entire rules set is made up of words and names, I'm not sure how this is meant to be reassuring.
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Yeah the only real question mark is how the concentrate trait is supposed to work in the remaster. But you can also just use the CRB version of the trait and be fine. It seems unlikely to matter to the kineticist with its super obvious magic.
I don't expect we will see much change, if any, to the Concentrate trait.
Thanks for all the advice everyone!
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Me: "Woohoo! I finally got my copy of Rage of Elements! The kineticist is back, baby!"
GM: "What's a kineticist?"
Me: "Think of the elemental benders from the Avatar series. It was one of the most popular classes in 1st edition. I've not delved into the 2e version as yet, but I've been hearing good things all week."
GM: "Is it using those new rules you've been talking about? 'Cause if so, I'm not allowing it in my games. I won't be converting over."
Me: *Stares stunned at this unexpected proclamation*
For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends. What stands out to you as especially awesome? What are your reasons for playing the class? Why are you switching to the new remastered ruleset? What informed your decisions?
If this doesn't get resolved soon, it's the end. No new material will be accepted into our home games. That will doom us all to mediocrity and stagnation. It can't end that way. It just can't. Help, I beg thee.
I think it's legitimate for a GM to say they're not interested in allowing a rule book into their game, especially one they haven't had time to read and digest yet.
That said, it is worth mentioning to him that it's not really a conversion. All the base rule mechanics are pretty much staying as is. There is no conversion necessary, all the math still works together just fine. There's nomenclature changes that you as a player could probably just convert when talking to the rest of your group.
But I maintain that's it's valid not to allow you to change mid-game or request you be allowed to play brand new material that the GM isn't yet comfortable with.
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Yeah, I wouldn't allow a character from a book that isn't officially out yet and I haven't had the time to look at. "Hey, don't play a kineticist in this campaign, maybe play one in the next one" feels like a reasonable ask.
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Yeah, perhaps you need to talk to the GM about what the actual differences are, and also about possibly playing kineticist next game (not your current).
Also, if the GM is hesitant despite the mechanical functionality of the game remaining 99% the same, perhaps waiting until that next game to follow up when they've had time to learn, read, digest, and even gather experience from the internet will help to change their current stance.
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For those of you who have seen the class and the new book, please help me sell the kineticist and the new remastered rules to my friends.This feels like borderline baiting.How so?
Are you expecting us to craft our own shadow opponents from our worst fears of what the critics are and then argue against that?...yes.
Fine. I'll spell it out.
Baiting: luring people into an argument that they can't win but will have an emotional attachment to and will not be willing to lose.
The Remaster itself, and the Kinetecist class both have a lot of emotional attachment to them from a lot of people in the community. Being told that you can't play what you want to play also has a lot of emotional baggage.
But this is also an argument that can't be won because we have no actual information on what the argument is. We are fighting our own fears.
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I am currently playing a Witch in an Age of Ashes game.
When the Remastered Player Core book becomes available and the GM and I can both look at the class and see what exactly the changes would be to my character in order to update to the new rules, then we will decide if and how to do the changes.
I don't expect we will see much change, if any, to the Concentrate trait.
Thanks for all the advice everyone!
Well, given that it has replaced verbal components on spells, either the trait needs to change or the whole paradigm around making speaking in a loud, clear voice to cast most spells needs to change. You yourself acknowledge how big a shift the latter would be:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43tr8&page=4?Overall-Remaster-impression#1 59
So I'm not sure why you feel confident about Concentrate remaining the same.
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Edit -Scratch that, PF1 system memory leak, they did indeed already rename what I was thinking about to Sustain a Spell or Activation.
With that said, I don't see any reason to scrap, rename, or change the Concentrate Trait, it is practically pointless except to be a tag for things to aim at such as Rage as it has no rules embedded to it itself.
There isn't any reason to change it except to shuffle some more words around given that they're not taking the approach of overhauling the Trait system to ensure they all have their own self-enclosed rules that govern how they work and instead still rely on each ability that targets them to include said rules for interaction.
Concentration mechanic?
Thank you for the clarification, breithauptclan.
I really hope we don't get a new concentration mechanic, Squiggit.
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Pretty sure Squiggit only said concentration mechanics because Themetricsystem started talking about them but then edited their post when Squiggit made them realize it was irrelvant.
With that said, I don't see any reason to scrap, rename, or change the Concentrate Trait, it is practically pointless except to be a tag for things to aim at such as Rage as it has no rules embedded to it itself.There isn't any reason to change it except to shuffle some more words around given that they're not taking the approach of overhauling the Trait system to ensure they all have their own self-enclosed rules that govern how they work and instead still rely on each ability that targets them to include said rules for interaction.
A) The concentrate trait has taken the place of verbal components, which certainly sounds like it will pull more weight than just Rage gating. Condensing traits to make them more self contained is in fact something they are trying to do with this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q_NyA75fUx86Aw1uk1AzSb78gfg2UfVydRg2yt5 prpw/edit
There’s a rules bandaid to rip off here: spell components were an OGL holdover, so they're being reworked. Paizo realized they could pull them out to make them more individual to the characters and put the manipulate and concentrate traits on the spells themselves so you don’t have to do weird things like look in the trait to discover a secret trait. It's more of a presentation change, nothing really changes, they just present it differently.
Going back and looking at the wording, it makes it sound like the trait itself won't change so much as each individual class's spellcasting form will change, which is interesting.
Yes my theory is the same that "make them more individual to the characters" means that the class casting ability is what will define if with concentration trait will be verbal or mental or musical or danced...
Would be cool if they made an exception to allow druids to casts in their battle forms using grunts and and simple movements instead of verbalizing. But it's unlikely.
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I can't help ya there, mainly because we really still have no clue just how different the Remaster will be. They say it's not that big of a shift, not even a half-edition change but the things they've shown so far tend to be simultaneously be good and worthwhile changes but also stuff that DOES fundamentally change the game, hell, they're replacing ALL of the Classes other than Kineticist (as far as we know, for now... I have reservations that RoE had enough time in the same oven they were cooking the Remaster in and will need to be cannibalized later on like the CRB, APG and the other half-dozen mainline books we know are getting redone over the next few years likely with future PC3, PC4, and probably LOC1 and LOC2 etc).
Why do you state that ALL of the Classes are replaced ? A few Core ones are redesigned and that's it.
Same, we do not know anything about other mainline books getting redone. Paizo has definitely not stated this AFAIK.
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I can't help ya there, mainly because we really still have no clue just how different the Remaster will be. They say it's not that big of a shift, not even a half-edition change but the things they've shown so far tend to be simultaneously be good and worthwhile changes but also stuff that DOES fundamentally change the game, hell, they're replacing ALL of the Classes other than Kineticist (as far as we know, for now... I have reservations that RoE had enough time in the same oven they were cooking the Remaster in and will need to be cannibalized later on like the CRB, APG and the other half-dozen mainline books we know are getting redone over the next few years likely with future PC3, PC4, and probably LOC1 and LOC2 etc).
Why do you state that ALL of the Classes are replaced ? A few Core ones are redesigned and that's it.
Same, we do not know anything about other mainline books getting redone. Paizo has definitely not stated this AFAIK.
We do actually know errata is planned for the other books in at minor degrees. Ability scores need to be changed to modifiers, and things like Arcane Cascade Stance need adjusting. That not to say the other classes are getting redesigned.
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I'm going to disengage after this last comment because to me it very much sounds like a few of you are in denial about what the Remaster actually means for PF2 OGL and I'm not sure it's a realization that some of your are able to handle or grasp at this point but I'll just say the following:
The OGL content that has been put out thus far is going to all be replaced in time, sure it's not already announced but there is a next to 0% chance they will do what effectively amounts to "free" Remasters of any books or content that was initially published under PF2 OGL conditions via Errata, the backlog for that content is IMMENSE and there is NO WAY they're going to be able to redo everything that has to be redone/tweaked, have it tested/edited/verified and then push those changes into OGL publications thereby opening all the new changes to be included in the OGL, if they're changing the name of things so they aren't part of the OGL they are NOT going to then go back and PUBLISH them in a book that is ITSELF an OGL book. Small errata to help bridge the gap is certainly likely to ease the quality of life until they can finish the Remaster books that will replace that old content for sure but rest assured they're not going to just NOT create a Remastered Magus, Summoner, Gunslinger, Psychic etc just to try to prop up the marketing angle of backward compatibility.
I might be wrong here but if I am that simply means that Paizo is not only leaving money on the table, they'd be actively burning it by failing to recreate most everything in PF2 OGL under the Remaster moniker.
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I'm going to disengage after this last comment because to me it very much sounds like a few of you are in denial about what the Remaster actually means for PF2 OGL
While I am not entirely sure what PF2 OGL is, I will say that it is less about denial and more about trust. I am currently taking on faith that what the game developers have said about the existing classes and adventure books and other such things that are not being Remastered is accurate - that they aren't being Remastered because it is not necessary. And that it is not necessary because the content of those books are already sufficiently compatible with the Remastered core rules that reprinting the books would not be of use to the customers.
We will have to wait until the Remastered rules become fully available in order to verify that the game devs are correct in their assessment.
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My impression is that... it's not like the OGL is inherently poison at this time. It still works. Nothing stops them from continuing to publish and sell copies of things like SoM and G&G under the OGL. It's just that conflicting legal requirements mean that you can't have the same book be under both OGL and ORC at the same time. So in order to have their books in the future be under ORC, they need to strip out every bit of the OGL material... which is extensive enough and in some cases fundamental enough that they need to rewrite meaningful chinks of the core material to make it happen, and that means rewriting the core *books*.
...and while they're at it, might as well do it right and work in a bunch of fixes to problems that have been discovered over the years. So the core books are getting a remaster, and the classes and ancestries *in* the core books are getting appropriate amounts of rebuild.
The other books, though? they don't need the attention because other stuff doesn't depend on them as much. If your campaign just doesn't have SoM or G&G in it, that's not really going to affect your ability to add new books later. There's no direct dependency there, which means that leaving them in their current OGL-based state is not problematic in the same way. Now, there are going to need to be some adjustments, like all of the spells in SoM being tweaked for the new spell format... but that's the sort of thing that can be handled with errata, without a huge amount of effort. (You don't need to errata each spell individually. You can do them all at once.) The errata, in turn, won't be adding to OGL at all. They'll be ORC, if anything. Just because it refers to an OGL book doesn't mean that it itself is under OGL. I don't expect them to get republished or remastered at all. Too much effort for not enough payoff.
I suppose that if and when they run into another reprinting for one of those books they might "remaster" it by folding in whatever errata they've pushed out for it up to that point, but I wouldn't necessarily expect any new printings of such books any time soon.
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PF2 APs use NPCs which are not built on PC-facing content, so they do not need to refer OGL-content in the future.
They might make a fully Remastered 10-year anniversary version of an AP like they did in the past.
But redoing new rulebooks that are mostly the same would create more loss than profits IMO.
Who would buy these ?
I really think new content will sell better.
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From what I've seen in Rage of Elements translating between the OGL PF2 and the ORC PF2 is basically effortless.
Most of the differences are going to be stuff like "If your strength is 4+" instead of "If your Strength is 18" and reading "Reflexive Strike" instead of "Attack of Opportunity."
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I think we are digressing more and more from the original topic