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This just seems like it takes the thing people complain about wiry things like the divine list lacking offensive capability or casters prioritizing certain spells, and just magnifies the problem. For example , it seems like these themes aren't going to be balanced around being able to tackle a wide array of issues but only fill a singular niche.
The issue is given the examples given thus far, you're going to get list that do not interact with combat, a major focus of pathfinder 2e. This is the "some focus spells are uselsss" cranked up to "some spell lists are useless" instead. All this looks like to me at least is creating a situation where casters go from a tradition with hundreds of spells, down to just 3 themes that will inevitably be deemed the best while the others are regarded as underpowered or useless, and if the class doesn't get that tradition list of the top tier meta it gets disparaged as being a class not worth taking or playing.
And I know that because that's exactly how you guys complaining about casters are acting right now with current casters, and I doubt you'd suddenly embrace playing suboptimally out of the blue to stick to this themed list conviction. People treat the witch and alchemist as unplayable due to the community reacting to its lack of optimized firepower, and they treat the inability to just nuke an enemy for more damage than 2 barbarian crits in a row as a failure of game design. Yall will just find the top 2 or 3 themes, only pick those, and then complain the other 47 ain't as good.
So... there's a bit to unpack, here.
- The intention is that the different themes be intentionally what they are. So if a given theme doesn't interact with combat, it should be pretty obvious that it doesn't interact with combat. If you're looking to get combat power out of your slot spells, then you'll make sure to get some themes that are not that theme.
- The intention is that each theme be, in some ways, focused to the point of incompleteness. If you pick one or two or three themes as the Big Important Themes that are all you care about, then you're going to have a lot of things that you simply can't do. There's certainly going to be a bit of an optimization game in figuring out how to get access to all of the things you want to get access to with as few themes as possible so that you can spend the rest of your slots on whatever it is that your class gets instead of More Themes, but that's in line with the level of character optimization that PF2 (and presumably PF3) supports and encourages - you can play for it, and you can even win it and enjoy it, but it wont' be enough of a difference to break the game.
- People say stuff. I think I've heard "X is the worst casting tradition" about every single tradition. I've certainly heard one person tell me that a given tradition was the worst and then someone completely different tell me that it was broken OP. Again, this is actually a good thing. Letting geeks have their strongly-held opinions about stuff like this is good. It's a concept-space that they can explore that doesn't hurt anyone.
- It actually partially fixes the problem of "every caster of tradition X is always casting Spell Y" because we split things up finer, and people are going to be picking different themes, so they'll have different spell lists to draw from, and probably advantages in casting from different spell lists.
- Here's the key. Different people want different things. For someone who wants to play a pure blaster? The themes thing lets them do that. It lets them dedicate themselves to pure blasterness and get really good at it, and actually get the kind of power they feel like they should have out of a pure blaster. They don't pay for any of the utility stuff because they don't want any of the utility stuff. They just want to blow people up with arcane power... and this system will make it easy for them to dial in on that and get it. For the people who want summons that are actually good, this will let them dial in on that, and not bother getting anything else, and wind up with actually good summons... or maybe they take a few side trips into healing and buffing and wind up with a summon/support caster whose summons aren't quite as good but still pretty nice. Basically,t he people who are complaining about not being able to outdamage a barbarian are the ones who are complaining about the compromises that they have to make in return for being a generalist caster when they don't actually want to be a generalist caster... because at the end of the day, the fragile guy in cloth armor who's only got a limited number of shots per day really should be doing more damage with his limited shots than the big strong beefy woman who can keep swinging forever unless someone drops her HP pool, if damage is the only thing the caster is doing.
That's the whole point of themes. Casters get to buy what they want. They don't pay for what they don't want. It's still fair, it's less samey, and a lot of people get to be happier without breaking the balance math.
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So there's one major element of this that I don't feel like ever gets addressed, but keeps being talked about as if it is. Rather than go off about missing it, I'm curious if I explain it out, if you'd indulge me in telling how your solution fixes this from your point of view.
So, themes as being proposed here are a narrow list of spells similar to what the Elementalist spell list does, but for everything you could theoretically want to build for. From my understand, theme's will be similar to kineticist elements so you'll obviously have your 6 elements. So I'm assuming you get spell themes like Death, Stars, Space, Martial Arts, Protection, Mind Control, etc etc. Just basically the same idea from Godbound but applied to Pathfinder spells.
The issue I have trouble parsing out is how all of this is actually expected to be balanced in a way that's fun. So casters as they stand now are currently balanced around the idea that you will have stuff like multiple means of attacking an enemy's saves or ac, have means of AOE or magic that can help circumvent environmental or social challenges, and spells that can help buff allies. By breaking the lists into themes, you propose that this will increase the casters power budget through some means.
But wouldn't they still need to balance around the idea that the caster has the best themes selected when making encounters/adventuring days? You said previously that if a character wants to be a generalist they can just pick more themes. But doesn't that means the Devs have to just assume you're gamifying the spellcasting system to have the actual absolutely best solution?
Like when they make an enemy, they have to balance it assuming that your caster picked the Blasting theme and Damage theme to deal maximum damage. Or assume you picked the Mind Control or Debilitation themes to maximize debuffs. So what happens if you pick the Trees and Leaf theme because you like being a leshy who triples down on nature? Or what if you are going for the generalist build that doesn't have these empowering feats you proposed? Doesn't that mean you basically just don't have a way to help in the fight, and thus fight balance is now completely out of wack because you didn't pick the right option?
Spell traditions as they stand at least give a decent chance for this not to happen. Even if you can't target the enemies weakest save, chances are you'll have the 2nd weakest you can do. This change feels like it's going to make every caster encounter a Golem-esque game of "I hope you brought the right theme to overcome this barrier, or screw you."
It just feels like this will promote the old PF 1e encounter design of "You didn't predict the encounter when making your character, so you lose." that was in some of the AP's like Carrion Crown or Tyrants Grasp where it's like "I hope you can bypass hardness or cast restoration because otherwise screw you, you lose." Hence my comment earlier of just the "top 3 themes will be the only ones picked" because they're going to need to pick the one that does the best damage and the one that does the best debuffing in order to match the required balance that assumes casters picked the most damaging and the most debuffing option. And anyone else who picks themes for, you know, thematic reasons ends up just left behind even worse than they currently are.
Because at least if you build a thematic spell list in PF 2e, the list is so huge that you can afford to throw in a few others or get scrolls/wands/spellhearts to help you out. This is just that problem, but taking even more time to retrain into a better option as well as just making a way more forgiving enviroment, at least from my POV.
I don't know if you see Paizo as just balancing for the average, or if there's some other elements to your design that I'm just not seeing. I'd love to see how this actually is meant to not bottleneck casters into minmaxing their theme choices to the most efficient ones possible to avoid encounter balance that they can't overcome.
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This feels disingenuous because it makes it seem like this is a caster problem, but this is more just an actual "this is a game and requires mechanics" issue.This exact argument exists for materials as well with "Why play Barbarian when Fighter exists?" or "Why outwit ranger when rogue exists?" The claim that casters of the same tradition play the same is identical to complaining that all strength-based characters play the same of getting a big weapon and using athletics in combat.
There's a difference. Casting class features do a lot more heavy lifting, which generally means there's less room for other stuff, so the classes in practice tend to feel more similar.
That said if you feel like Paizo doesn't do enough make martials feel distinct there's nothing stopping you from making a thread about it.
This post made me think about what the big difference between casters and martials could be that we can so easily distinguish between martials and less between casters.
And I think the answer is actually pretty obvious. Almost every round, the martial will be hitting things. And how they hit things (big damage, high accuracy, rider effects, devise a stratagem ...) is the core identity of the class. So the martials affirm their class identity every round.
What the casters do every round is cast a spell. But, except for focus spells, casting a spell affirms the Tradition and not the class.
Being potentially able to cast more focus spells in combat in Remastered will help.
But I feel more class affirming actions in combat would be needed to make each casting class more distinct from its fellows of the same Tradition.
So there's one major element of this that I don't feel like ever gets addressed, but keeps being talked about as if it is. Rather than go off about missing it, I'm curious if I explain it out, if you'd indulge me in telling how your solution fixes this from your point of view.
So, themes as being proposed here are a narrow list of spells similar to what the Elementalist spell list does, but for everything you could theoretically want to build for. From my understand, theme's will be similar to kineticist elements so you'll obviously have your 6 elements. So I'm assuming you get spell themes like Death, Stars, Space, Martial Arts, Protection, Mind Control, etc etc. Just basically the same idea from Godbound but applied to Pathfinder spells.
The issue I have trouble parsing out is how all of this is actually expected to be balanced in a way that's fun. So casters as they stand now are currently balanced around the idea that you will have stuff like multiple means of attacking an enemy's saves or ac, have means of AOE or magic that can help circumvent environmental or social challenges, and spells that can help buff allies. By breaking the lists into themes, you propose that this will increase the casters power budget through some means.
But wouldn't they still need to balance around the idea that the caster has the best themes selected when making encounters/adventuring days? You said previously that if a character wants to be a generalist they can just pick more themes. But doesn't that means the Devs have to just assume you're gamifying the spellcasting system to have the actual absolutely best solution?
Like when they make an enemy, they have to balance it assuming that your caster picked the Blasting theme and Damage theme to deal maximum damage. Or assume you picked the Mind Control or Debilitation themes to maximize debuffs. So what happens if you pick the Trees and Leaf theme because you like being a leshy who triples down on nature? Or what if you are...
So why not just gate what each new specialist caster is able to take in addition to heavily siloing the spells by theme? If you can't access certain tools or have to wait until high level and spend feats to get them they're less of a balance concern than they are when everybody gets them by default for zero cost.
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The issue I have trouble parsing out is how all of this is actually expected to be balanced in a way that's fun. So casters as they stand now are currently balanced around the idea that you will have stuff like multiple means of attacking an enemy's saves or ac, have means of AOE or magic that can help circumvent environmental or social challenges, and spells that can help buff allies. By breaking the lists into themes, you propose that this will increase the casters power budget through some means.
I'd say that the current implementation we have of casters being balanced around targeting multiple defenses and having a variety of damage types is not necessarily a universal across all possible game systems. It could be perfectly possible in a hypothetical 3e for saves and immunities to be done in such a way that a caster that targets just one save and outputs just one damage type would still be viable, and such a framework would generally work better with more specialized caster classes. I can't say as much for exploration and social challenges, as I think that's a different can of worms, but if nothing else, 2e shows that it's possible to come up with a robust skill system that lets any character participate in those other aspects of gameplay.
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...So there's one major element of this that I don't feel like ever gets addressed, but keeps being talked about as if it is. Rather than go off about missing it, I'm curious if I explain it out, if you'd indulge me in telling how your solution fixes this from your point of view.
So, themes as being proposed here are a narrow list of spells similar to what the Elementalist spell list does, but for everything you could theoretically want to build for. From my understand, theme's will be similar to kineticist elements so you'll obviously have your 6 elements. So I'm assuming you get spell themes like Death, Stars, Space, Martial Arts, Protection, Mind Control, etc etc. Just basically the same idea from Godbound but applied to Pathfinder spells.
The issue I have trouble parsing out is how all of this is actually expected to be balanced in a way that's fun. So casters as they stand now are currently balanced around the idea that you will have stuff like multiple means of attacking an enemy's saves or ac, have means of AOE or magic that can help circumvent environmental or social challenges, and spells that can help buff allies. By breaking the lists into themes, you propose that this will increase the casters power budget through some means.
But wouldn't they still need to balance around the idea that the caster has the best themes selected when making encounters/adventuring days? You said previously that if a character wants to be a generalist they can just pick more themes. But doesn't that means the Devs have to just assume you're gamifying the spellcasting system to have the actual absolutely best solution?
Like when they make an enemy, they have to balance it assuming that your caster picked the Blasting theme and Damage theme to deal maximum damage. Or assume you picked the Mind Control or Debilitation themes to maximize debuffs. So what happens if you pick the Trees and Leaf theme because you like being a leshy who triples down on nature? Or what if you are...
That is an excellent concern.
And I feel tackling this would need to have in the game both generalist caster classes and specialist caster classes.
Where the generalist classes are assumed to have potential access to all spells of all themes and are balanced around this.
Whereas the specialist classes are assume to have access only to their specific theme and are balanced around it.
Which brings us back mostly to the Wizard as a generalist class and the Kineticist as a specialist class.
And the question Michael Sayre mentioned : is there enough interest in a given specialist class to make it worth the time, effort and cost to design it ?
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I am going to say this straight. This way of balancing is the absolute worst way to balance things.
What you are describing is effectively saying that because someone can have fire and another can have ice both of those should be weaker because a third person could have both. Instead of balancing such that each option is comparable thus interchangeable, you are balancing on a theoretical "what if someone has the perfect options every time" which is never true unless they are cheating; Its also why white room scenarios are good for testing the numbers but not actual play experience.
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Here is a thought experiment. Assume you have 4 players wanting to play a caster. You have Player A who picked 3 damage spells and feats, Player B who picked 3 utility spells and feats, Player C who picked 3 support and spells feats, and Player D who picked 1 of each spells and feats. The way PF2 is balanced and you are asking about would have Player A to C become weaker because Player D has the option of picking one of each spells and feats. The other way to balance is for every spell and feat to be about equal and thus Player A to D are equally strong; Player A to C would naturally be stronger at the option they have most off, while Player D would have more options but weaker.
Now lets assume Creature A is weak to damage, Creature B is weak to utility, and Creature C is weak to support. That means that Players A to C are best in certain scenarios and can handle multiple of those scenarios in a day. Player D having picked one of each can handle each scenario once, but after that they are done.
In short, you should not be assuming that the player has every option because that is not true. You should not assume that the player has the best option because if the game is truly balanced then every option should be just as strong. You should not punish someone that chose to specialize because they had the option to generalize, the fact that their specialty might never come up or even be effective is punishment enough.
Not accounting for powergaming is how we got the excesses of PF1.
No thanks.
I don't think you can introduce slot-based specialists without also creating more "wrong" party compositions. I think 2e is working pretty hard to make sure whatever spec you pick, the other players' reaction at the table won't be to groan in annoyance that you picked the wrong one, and this would work against that.
The only way I see would be to create Archetypes that make slot-based casters part-kineticist in terms of design, giving them weaker but slotless, all-day versions of their favorite spells.
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...So there's one major element of this that I don't feel like ever gets addressed, but keeps being talked about as if it is. Rather than go off about missing it, I'm curious if I explain it out, if you'd indulge me in telling how your solution fixes this from your point of view.
Okay. Sure. I'll see what I can do.
So, themes as being proposed here are a narrow list of spells similar to what the Elementalist spell list does, but for everything you could theoretically want to build for. From my understand, theme's will be similar to kineticist elements so you'll obviously have your 6 elements. So I'm assuming you get spell themes like Death, Stars, Space, Martial Arts, Protection, Mind Control, etc etc. Just basically the same idea from Godbound but applied to Pathfinder spells.
As a preliminary thing, I want to state outright that I'm not trying to figure out what the list of themes should be right now. Doing that job right seems like its own task, involving significant effort, and better left to people who are better at this than I (ie, Paizo devs). At some point, if I'm feeling *super*-motivated, I might try to kludge my way through a preliminary answer while showing all of the logic behind it, in the hopes of saving said Paizo devs a bit of the trouble, but I'm really not ready to handle that right now.
That said, very broadly speaking, yes. The themes that I've had floating around in my head are things like Healing, Undead, Blessings, Maledictions, Dimensional, Creation, and so forth.
More dialed-in, though, starting with "like what the Elementalist spell list does" and grabbing a bunch of stuff that feels thematic is going to give you an incorrect idea of how the balance for this one works. Each theme only does a small number of different kinds of things, and thus if you want to be able to do lots of kinds of things, you need a lot of themes. that's a pretty critical part of the balance proposition.
The issue I have trouble parsing out is how all of this is actually expected to be balanced in a way that's fun. So casters as they stand now are currently balanced around the idea that you will have stuff like multiple means of attacking an enemy's saves or ac, have means of AOE or magic that can help circumvent environmental or social challenges, and spells that can help buff allies. By breaking the lists into themes, you propose that this will increase the casters power budget through some means.
No. I've never said that I was going to increase the caster's power budget. Ideally, in a well-balanced game, everyone starts off with the same power budget, and then they spend it on various things. Regardless, you're still always limited to the same budget. It's perhaps a bit of a nitpicking distinction, but I think it's an important one. Basically, current casters spend a lot of their budget on the raw flexibility that they get with their tradition. Let's just say for the sake of easy understanding, that each tradition was just split up into themes. If you started with a witch, and then sold back some of your themes, you'd have less of that flexibility, and it would therefore be possible to give you something else without running over your power budget.
But wouldn't they still need to balance around the idea that the caster has the best themes selected when making encounters/adventuring days? You said previously that if a character wants to be a generalist they can just pick more themes. But doesn't that means the Devs have to just assume you're gamifying the spellcasting system to have the actual absolutely best solution?
You have this deeply dialed-in focus on the idea that there necessarily must be a "best themes"... and further, that they'll be so obviously and significantly the "best themes" that everyone who's optimizing will necessarily grab them, and then need to be balanced against.
SO the first answer is that that's just not so. Now, you will absolutely have people who convince themselves that they have the best themes. They'll grab some reasonably efficient set for direct damage, and possibly the healing theme, and they'll feel really good about themselves... but they won't have debuffs, and they won't have buffs, and they won't have mobility, and they won't have a lot in the way of utility powers, and there's a lot of other things that they won't have. They'll be very good at healing and damage-dealing, and if that's the only two things you care about, you should be able to be pretty good at them.
...but there is no "actual absolutely best solution", because PF2 is a party op game, and one where a lot of different situations come up. I assume that PF3 will be the same... so the "absolute best" is going to depend on who your fellow party members are and what they play and what they need, and it's also going to vary based on what kinds of situations you're running into.
So... it should be pretty straightforward to pick a decent, functional set of themes, and that is what they will balance against. if you know your party, and you know the system, and maybe even know some things about the campaign it should also be possible to squeeze a bit more advantage out of picking and choosing very carefully... and PF2 is okay with you squeezing out that bit of extra advantage. It's thin, but it's there, and that's okay. Presumably PF3 will be the same.
Like when they make an enemy, they have to balance it assuming that your caster picked the Blasting theme and Damage theme to deal maximum damage. Or assume you picked the Mind Control or Debilitation themes to maximize debuffs. So what happens if you pick the Trees and Leaf theme because you like being a leshy who triples down on nature? Or what if you are going for the generalist build that doesn't have these empowering feats you proposed? Doesn't that mean you basically just don't have a way to help in the fight, and thus fight balance is now completely out of wack because you didn't pick the right option?
When I read this, and try to parse it, the result I get is as follows:
"But doesn't that mean that any (caster) character who isn't perfectly optimal is utterly worthless?"
And to this I say No. No, that's not what it means. PF2 has been very good at not falling into that trap, and I have no reason to believe that PF3 will be any different. A specialist is going to do better in cases where their specialty is particularly effective, and somewhat worse in cases where it is worse. A generalist is going to do reasonably well in all cases, as long as they can effectively leverage their breadth of options. Neither is going to be utterly worthless... any more than any of the (very not-generalist) martials will be utterly worthless.
Spell traditions as they stand at least give a decent chance for this not to happen. Even if you can't target the enemies weakest save, chances are you'll have the 2nd weakest you can do. This change feels like it's going to make every caster encounter a Golem-esque game of "I hope you brought the right theme to overcome this barrier, or screw you."
It just feels like this will promote the old PF 1e encounter design of "You didn't predict the encounter when making your character, so you lose." that was in some of the AP's like Carrion Crown or Tyrants Grasp where it's like "I hope you can bypass hardness or cast restoration because otherwise screw you, you lose." Hence my comment earlier of just the "top 3 themes will be the only ones picked" because they're going to need to pick the one that does the best damage and the one that does the best debuffing in order to match the required balance that assumes casters picked the most damaging and the most debuffing option. And anyone else who picks themes for, you know, thematic reasons ends up just left behind even worse than they currently are.
I get the feeling that you got hurt *bad* by PF1 and/or 3.x in general, and it concerns you. You've found one way out of that swamp - the PF2 technique, where all casters are generalist casters - and you cling to it, and fear it being torn from you.
Here's the thing, though. people are already playing specialist casters, with no specialist bonuses at all, and it still basically works. It's not great. It often feels kind of weak and unsatisfying... but they're still functional, and their parties are still functional. PF2 doesn't really have that whole "if you don't have this particular spell, then you're just horked" thing. So no. You don't have to pick "the best" themes in order to keep up with the Johnsons.
Because at least if you build a thematic spell list in PF 2e, the list is so huge that you can afford to throw in a few others or get scrolls/wands/spellhearts to help you out. This is just that problem, but taking even more time to retrain into a better option as well as just making a way more forgiving enviroment, at least from my POV.
I don't know if you see Paizo as just balancing for the average, or if there's some other elements to your design that I'm just not seeing. I'd love to see how this actually is meant to not bottleneck casters into minmaxing their theme choices to the most efficient ones possible to avoid encounter balance that they can't overcome.
- I absolutely see Paizo balancing for the average. They've pretty much straight-up told us that that's what they do, and I trust them on this.
- I have been very favorably impressed at Paizo's ability to establish and maintain balance. I trust them to be able to assemble a list of themes that doesn't really have a "best" like you describe, especially as they're explicitly intended to be a limit on the kinds of things you can do, in ways that, in many cases, are not directly comparable. Further, I trust them to have a grasp of the value of the themes when combined with each other, and be able to balance accordingly. As far as I can tell, they do this kind of balance already. It's just that casters, thus far, have only ever come back with one of four incredibly broad answers.
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apologies again for the double posting.
I don't think you can introduce slot-based specialists without also creating more "wrong" party compositions. I think 2e is working pretty hard to make sure whatever spec you pick, the other players' reaction at the table won't be to groan in annoyance that you picked the wrong one, and this would work against that.
The only way I see would be to create Archetypes that make slot-based casters part-kineticist in terms of design, giving them weaker but slotless, all-day versions of their favorite spells.
I...what?
Okay. Let me try to unpack what I think you're saying.
- You're convinced that giving casters more build flexibility will increase the rate at which people look across the table and are unhappy at the characters that their fellow players have brought.
- You believe that this is a critical failing that is entirely unacceptable.
- Your solution is to create archetypes (?) that make slot-casters more like kineticists (?) and that will solve the problem somehow (???).
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Okay. I'm going to assume that I am not understanding you well, because this just isn't making sense to me. I get the impression that there are steps in your thought process that are so blindingly obvious to you that you assume they must be equally obvious to me, and so you're not bothering to write them down.
They're not.
Still, I'm going to try to answer based on that anyway, by addressing the most cogent point that I can think of that might be one of those implied chunks of logic.
If this does not actually address your concerns, then please, by all means, explain further.
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So one concern you might be having is how easy it is to build nonviable characters by mistake. We don't want it to be easy to build nonviable characters by mistake, because Newbie Traps Are Bad... and any time you add additional flexibility to a system, there's a good chance that you'll make it easy to make mistakes.
This is a legit concern, and the answer to it comes in class design. Fortunately, Paizo already has a solution, and we can just keep using it. They use the core class chassis. The way to make sure that clueless newbies can't make broken-bad characters that don't work is to figure out what the bare minimum is that a given class needs to fulfil its basic function, and then make sure that that part is bolted on in a way that can't be removed. So in this case, it would mean that full-caster classes would generally have some number of themes (like, say, three?) that the class just had stapled on from the beginning, before you got to the part where you started picking your optionals. You make it so that it's simply impossible to create a sorceror without at least some kind of blast. Clerics always get either Healing/Benedictions/Divine Wrath or Blight/Maledictions/Undead... or whatever the split is. Regardless, if you pick a class, you'll automatically get the themes necessary to do the basic work of that class.
...and if you want to play a class that has only one particular theme, then you probably want either a non-caster who's got one theme's worth of casting off of an archetype, or a dedicated specialist that's inherently designed around the fact that this is the one theme they get... or something like that.
Does that help? Or was that maybe not what you were concerned about at all? If it's the latter, then please clarify.
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Which brings us back mostly to the Wizard as a generalist class and the Kineticist as a specialist class.
And the question Michael Sayre mentioned : is there enough interest in a given specialist class to make it worth the time, effort and cost to design it ?
...and this is actually where the whole "themes" idea came from, because the current structure actually makes building specialist classes a lot harder than it has to be. If you want a spell list that's smaller than "a full tradition" then either you freeze it in amber at time of publication or it requires constant update work every time you add new spells to see which ones qualify. I proposed a design for the "freeze in amber" solution, and very nearly everybody hated it, generally because they hated the idea that their spell lists would be frozen in amber.
This is the way out of that trap. Instead of splitting up spells by large, chunky traditions, you split them up by smaller, more functional themes. Then, when you want a specialist caster, you just give them only one or two themes. When you want a generalist, you give them a bunch. in the meantime, it gives a nifty tool for more fine-grained class customization on the Paizo side, and it means that people aren't all running around with identical spell lists. Lets the classes and subclasses and whatnot have more flavor, too.
Basically, if we start off with themes from the beginning (which does have some pleasant effects even on largely generalist casters) then when we get down to the specialist casters, that time/effort/cost will be notably reduced, and so that question will get an increased number of affirmative answers. I count that as a good thing.
Also, I don't count the Kineticist as the same thing, really, at all. The Kineticist is a specialist, yes, but it is also very specifically not a slot caster. That's important.
...So there's one major element of this that I don't feel like ever gets addressed, but keeps being talked about as if it is. Rather than go off about missing it, I'm curious if I explain it out, if you'd indulge me in telling how your solution fixes this from your point of view.Okay. Sure. I'll see what I can do.
So, themes as being proposed here are a narrow list of spells similar to what the Elementalist spell list does, but for everything you could theoretically want to build for. From my understand, theme's will be similar to kineticist elements so you'll obviously have your 6 elements. So I'm assuming you get spell themes like Death, Stars, Space, Martial Arts, Protection, Mind Control, etc etc. Just basically the same idea from Godbound but applied to Pathfinder spells.As a preliminary thing, I want to state outright that I'm not trying to figure out what the list of themes should be right now. Doing that job right seems like its own task, involving significant effort, and better left to people who are better at this than I (ie, Paizo devs). At some point, if I'm feeling *super*-motivated, I might try to kludge my way through a preliminary answer while showing all of the logic behind it, in the hopes of saving said Paizo devs a bit of the trouble, but I'm really not ready to handle that right now.
That said, very broadly speaking, yes. The themes that I've had floating around in my head are things like Healing, Undead, Blessings, Maledictions, Dimensional, Creation, and so forth.
More dialed-in, though, starting with "like what the Elementalist spell list does" and grabbing a bunch of stuff that feels thematic is going to give you an incorrect idea of how the balance for this one works. Each theme only does a small number of different kinds of things, and thus if you want to be able to do lots of kinds of things, you need a lot of themes. that's a pretty critical part of the balance...
Thank you for giving your thoughts on the matter. I appreciate the explanation you've given for this problem point.
Yes, I was burned badly by Tyrants Grasp. That game loved to throw "Have the right niche prepared or suffer" type encounters almost every single time. Carrion Crown ended at level 1 with a TPK from a animated scythe, because nobody had a means of bypassing hardness consistently. Iron Gods had a similar issue as well of being very punishing for not preparing the right solutions.
It's why I like the PF 2e balance we have now. The condensing of spell lists into traditions as well as the tighter balance makes those encounters a distant memory for the most part. I fear that creating themes and truncating casting is going to be too much strain on the developers ability to give that same amount of balance. They're only human, and they're not that particularly large of a developer. I fear having to balance and counter balance these Themes against one another is going to just be a massive time sink and drag on their work for what is very little difference than if they'd stuck to traditions as is.
So one concern you might be having is how easy it is to build nonviable characters by mistake. We don't want it to be easy to build nonviable characters by mistake, because Newbie Traps Are Bad... and any time you add additional flexibility to a system, there's a good chance that you'll make it easy to make mistakes.
This is a legit concern, and the answer to it comes in class design. Fortunately, Paizo already has a solution, and we can just keep using it. They use the core class chassis.
Yes, this is what I was (clumsily) trying to get at. I don't think you can make a specialist caster that satisfies those who want them, without chopping off too much of the class chassis for them to remain viable for all content.
There's nothing stopping people from making a pyromancer with only fire spells right now, but people are unhappy with the outcome because you sacrifice your flexibility and get nothing in return. As I understand it, the reason you get nothing is in the name of balance. So, if you want to sacrifice and get something, you have to lose something else, and that something else will have to come from the class chassis.
Thank you for giving your thoughts on the matter. I appreciate the explanation you've given for this problem point.
Yes, I was burned badly by Tyrants Grasp. That game loved to throw "Have the right niche prepared or suffer" type encounters almost every single time. Carrion Crown ended at level 1 with a TPK from a animated scythe, because nobody had a means of bypassing hardness consistently. Iron Gods had a similar issue as well of being very punishing for not preparing the right solutions.
It's why I like the PF 2e balance we have now. The condensing of spell lists into traditions as well as the tighter balance makes those encounters a distant memory for the most part. I fear that creating themes and truncating casting is going to be too much strain on the developers ability to give that same amount of balance. They're only human, and they're not that particularly large of a developer. I fear having to balance and counter balance these Themes against one another is going to just be a massive time sink and drag on their work for what is very little difference than if they'd stuck to traditions as is.
So, it's my understanding that PF2 APs generally don't have the "have the proper spell prepared or else" problem in anything like the same way. That's what's solving that particular problem, more than the tradition-based spell lists. If you have a party composed entirely of swashbucklers or something, then you could find that you have encounters that give you very serious trouble, but it's a lot more flexible than it was. Heck - as far as we can see, they're even changing up the golems in the remaster so that they're not that way, and they were one of the last bastions of the old guard on that matter. I don't believe that particular gygaxism is coming back.
Now, it's true that if you bring a specialist caster to the table, and you're playing an AP (which assumes a degree of party optimization) then you're going to need to make sure that your specialist caster is going to work well with the rest of the team... but you kind of need to do that for any class you migth bring.
As far as balancing and counter-balancing Themes... it's simpler than you think.
First, they actually have to make the themes. This is, legit, the hard part. They have to come up with both a satisfying thematic underpinning and and appropriate restrictive set of spell effects, and the two have to work well together. Once they've done that, though, it's all pretty straightforward.
- When making spells, each spell goes into one or more of these buckets, based on what effects it has, and gets themed accordingly. For the initial roll-out, each theme needs to get enough spells that it can perform its basic function, but that should be pretty doable
- Keep rough track of how many spells are in each theme as you go. If one of them is running a bit lean, maybe give it a bit more love the next time you have a book with some new spells in it. If one of them is looking a bit bloated, maybe leave it fallow for a book or two.
- When you're building a class, your themes have their thematic underpinning and their effect sets, and this should make it really easy to figure out which themes you want to give it outright, and which ones you want to make achievable but not automatic. You don't need to worry about individual spells, because you already know what kinds of effects are in that theme, and you can already assume that possession of that theme means that you have enough spells of that type to Do That Thing.
The Paizo devs have made it pretty clear that if they have control over which effects a character can wield, then they can frob the balance math appropriately. This is a way to give them that control, in a way that PF2 doesn't have.
Yes, this is what I was (clumsily) trying to get at. I don't think you can make a specialist caster that satisfies those who want them, without chopping off too much of the class chassis for them to remain viable for all content.
There's nothing stopping people from making a pyromancer with only fire spells right now, but people are unhappy with the outcome because you sacrifice your flexibility and get nothing in return. As I understand it, the reason you get nothing is in the name of balance. So, if you want to sacrifice and get something, you have to lose something else, and that something else will have to come from the class chassis.
If it helps, a true dedicated pyromancer would be filling a role in the party that would be a lot more like, say, a Bow ranger than like a standard wizard. Heavy focus on generating ranged DPR, with relatively low flexibility or utility. It's just that the pyro would be doing it with fire spells, rather than arrows. Also, they'd almost certainly be an entirely different class that's built around being a single-theme specialist, rather than some sort of weird crippled wizard/sorcerer/whatever.
If it helps, a true dedicated pyromancer would be filling a role in the party that would be a lot more like, say, a Bow ranger than like a standard wizard. Heavy focus on generating ranged DPR, with relatively low flexibility or utility. It's just that the pyro would be doing it with fire spells, rather than arrows. Also, they'd almost certainly be an entirely different class that's built around being a single-theme specialist, rather than some sort of weird crippled wizard/sorcerer/whatever.
I would actually love that, I just don't know how slotted blasters and all-day blasters could be balanced with each other.
If you make slotted blasts stronger because they are limited, then as long as you're not chaining many encounters the slotted blaster is strictly better than the kineticist. And if you make the slotted blasts equal to the all-day blasts then the slotted blaster becomes a kineticist that can run out of fuel, thus strictly worse.
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If specialists and generalists are to be balanced within the same class, I think there needs to be a way for specialists to really get better than the generalists at their specialty.
Maybe going for a specialty theme instead of investing in several themes allows you to get the higher level spells, whereas the generalist can only heighten the low level spells they have. And / or you get bonus to spell attacks and save DCs over what the generalist gets. Or some other advantage that makes it worth specializing.
I guess this way, the balancing would be split in two more simple acts : balancing the generalist with their potential access to all themes with other classes, and then balancing the specialist vs the generalist within the same class.
If the mind theme was designed like a Kineticist element, it would A) have multiple mechanical roles, so a lot of your spells are control effects on enemies, but some might buff allies as well, giving you thematic options, and B) provide a way to empower your own magic to overcome the walls they know you specifically will hit. Maybe that means your mind magic can control the base instincts of the ooze, reprogram constructs, or mimic the commands of the necromancer who raised those undead. Or maybe it just means that these creatures are constructed a bit differently, so that they automatically critically succeed saving throws against mind-altering effects, but you have an ability that turns all enemy critical successes into normal successes to future-proof it. It could take many forms. In this model, your spell school IS your bread and butter, and it's very toasty bred with delicious butter that has a built-in way to overcome mold (the metaphor is breaking down). But if you were a wizard who chose to diversify, you would simply set that undead on fire. Both options would be available, and both would be fun and viable.
I feel like you have it the wrong way around: the whole game is designed around different types of encounters and not doing the same thing over and over, but that's why the Kineticist is the exception, not the rule. Martials have different weapons, spellcasters can choose different spells if one option doesn't work. Kineticists don't, and that's why they get a little help. Allowing a mind-wizard to target oozes and mind-immune stuff just means they get to keep pressing the same button over and over again without repercussions.
And, in all honesty, I keep saying that the Kineticist is an exception, but I personally think it shouldn't. The Fire Kineticist should face the same problems the Fire-elemental Sorcerer. Specialisation comes at the cost of utility, and either all classes get it, or none of them. I'm in favour of the latter, clearly. And hell, each flavour of Kineticist has their own strengths and weaknessess already. Fire is great at offense, not so great at defense, and so on. The Wizard as-is has no weaknesses, apart from not being able to survive in direct melee, but that's not the issue.So... yeah. They currently are big umbrella lists, and this "themes" thing is intended to be a fix for some of the problems that raises. If you want your standard super-flexible casters, the solution is easy - just give them a bunch of themes. I'm not trying to prevent people from playing the batman wizard who has a spell for every occasion. Thing is, though, there's a lot of the playerbase that wants to play magic-users who aren't that... and the spell list thing means that every full caster pretty much is that, automatically. That's why we cant' give casters the really good buffs. We have to limit their spell DC because they have enough breadth in their spells to pick whichever defense they want to target. We have to limit the effectiveness of battle forms because after they're done playing around in battle form, they get to come back up out of it and use a bunch of spells that aren't battle form. Also... there are serious and largely unavoidable similarities between any two classes on the same list. There are differences between a divine sorceror and a divine witch and an oracle, but they're not as significant as we might want. So this structure lets them easily have both classes that get a lot of themes (and the breadth that goes with them) and only a few themes (and the ability to get other stuff with the budget that that specialization frees up).
See my comment above about how specialisation should come at the cost of utility. If you're a fire Wizard and you're fighting a fire elemental, well, that sucks. Better luck next time.
But secondly, the classes are all very broad in scope, and for a reason. You get to fill in how you want that class to function in your game. That necessarily means it has to remain open-ended design-wise so that you don't cut off possibilities for others. It's much easier to design these big umbrella lists and classes that use these lists than design several hyper-specific cases. As alluded to earlier by someone else, it's insanely difficult to balance them all against each other. Much easier to play it safe than to lose yourself in overdesigned subcategories and still piss off a big part of the audience.And again, the remaster is going to give the Wizard schools. I don't know how many there are going to be, but from the examples they gave it's easy enough to homebrew your own. Also, as I said before as well, just because you have access to everything doesn't mean you have to use everything. If you're upset that your kablooie Fireball-Wizard has the potential (not even the ability, merely the possibility of being out of theme) to learn a non-destructive spell, you're taking things too far, IMHO.
I'm reminded of that person a while ago who was angry that they couldn't dump their DEX all the way to 1 because they wanted to play a person in a wheelchair. That big fat 8 on their character sheet was so much proof that they could move that it broke their fantasy. I feel this is similar: they couldn't suspend their disbelief because the rules didn't allow them to, while I feel it's the other way around: your imagination should be able to overlook such a detail that it isn't an issue anymore.
Honestly, it's hard for me to not see a complaint like that without a great deal of suspicion. Primarily because, frankly, the concept of "suspension of disbelief" assumes a lot of very incorrect things about the way people operate. It actually requires special effort to disbelieve, and the default state of people is a degree of "belief". If this wasn't the case media couldn't work the way it does. So someone making this complaint is putting up barriers in order to maintain their lack of immersion and sort of ruining the fun for themselves. Which is also why I'm not particularly sympathetic to people refusing to just play a kineticist when it is everything they want, because it is. They are just making the situation difficult for themselves, and by extension the rest of us
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And again, the remaster is going to give the Wizard schools. I don't know how many there are going to be, but from the examples they gave it's easy enough to homebrew your own. Also, as I said before as well, just because you have access to everything doesn't mean you have to use everything. If you're upset that your kablooie Fireball-Wizard has the potential (not even the ability, merely the possibility of being out of theme) to learn a non-destructive spell, you're taking things too far, IMHO.
I'm reminded of that person a while ago who was angry that they couldn't dump their DEX all the way to 1 because they wanted to play a person in a wheelchair. That big fat 8 on their character sheet was so much proof that they could move that it broke their fantasy. I feel this is similar: they couldn't suspend their disbelief because the rules didn't allow them to, while I feel it's the other way around: your imagination should be able to overlook such a detail that it isn't an issue anymore.
You have missed the point entirely. It's like this. PF2 has tight balance math. (We have every reason to expect that PF3 will have the same.) Further, the devs have openly stated on multiple occasions that any kind of further buff to casters is choked hard by the fact that they have so many options with which to approach any given situation. That flexibility is expensive when it comes to the balance math.
So when you have a character who gets that flexibility as part of their class, and then just chooses to not use it, they are fundamentally weaker (and often significantly weaker than their fellow PCs This is unpleasant and unfun. This is what they are objecting to. They want to be able to play a specialist caster who's reasonably well-balanced with everyone else, and for right now, they can't do that... because all of the full casters are inherently generalists.
Ironically, if we were running 3.x, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. in a game where the tier system was a thing, and where you already had to limit who could play what in order to get everyone on the same power level, they could say "I'm going to play a Sorceror, but only these three kinds of spells" and just drop the effective tier of their character and play with the warlocks and the incarnum classes and the initiators. PF2's tight math, though, means that if you're putting major self-imposed constraints on your ability to leverage the power of your class, there's no lower tier to drop down to.
Runelord archetype (Thassilonian Specialist) was the best place to put feats that boost just a specific school. The entire point of rune magic is what this thread is about, focusing on a specific set of spells. But well, we know how that turned out.
That is not the same as this. Like, I honestly don't know how it turned out, and I'm saying that these are not the same anyway. First, the schools were larger and less coherent than I'm suggesting themes to be, which severely undermines their utility as far as fine-tuning what sorts of spell effects the caster does and does not have access to. Second, it's not about "boost a specific school" directly. It's about limiting the available spell effects that a given caster can generate in a coherent and controllable way so that they can gain various benefits with the freed-up power budget (including, perhaps, access to different spells).