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Quality getting worse.
like strength based animal companions not scaling after level 14?
Battle forms having terrible language for what you do and don't use to calculate your damage?
Or instances of damage?There's still things from the Core rule book that haven't been fixed, so the amount of stuff that needs fixing now feels par for the course. The problem is that it all compiles and stacks. It feels bad because the rate of fixing errors doesn't match up to the amount of errors being made, so there's always just more and more errors.
Classes have gotten much better, seeing how Guardian flipped around gives me hope that I might enjoy Necromancer. ATs have always been all over the place, some are just flavor, some are too hyper focused without breaking the design limits even when they are super limited, others are extremely useful and make the others look bad in comparison.
Several experimental projects, Kingdom building and Mythic rules most notably, desperately needed a play test because they have a ton of problems. I hope that instead of shying away from such attempts, they put more time into them going forward.
I think that touches on the big problem, time. They likely don't have the time to fix all the fires (OGL, Diamond, etc) as well as keeping workflow and workforce strong while keeping the pace to keep revenue flowing. That means cutting corners to make do, yet I don't feel product quality has been one of those corners.
As an aside, I don't miss Mark.
I follow both his and RFC's discord and YouTube channels. I think the work he's done since leaving is more flavorful and better designed, especially after they remastered dragons.With that in mind, I hope the designers at Paizo get to have the time and space they need to have their passion for the work flourish.
yes worse than that. Remastered psychic isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
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edit: what also seems to be a massive problem, at least to me, is that books feel more and more like the people working on them do not communicate with each other. leading to leaving you scratching your head when you look some stuff next to some other stuff from the same book. Like, looking at the martial vs the caster side on the mythic rules, or to two different chapters of an AP feeling completely disjointed, or to some spells/abilities being massively disappointing while the next one is massively overpowered, and etc).
That's always been a thing with AP books and I hope the move to single volumes releasing at the same time will help since they can be written at the same time instead of staggered. At least, I hope so.
It's definitely coming up more often with the actual rules these days though, which early on felt very cohesive and now we get stuff like "nerf Monk archetype flurry of blows and right afterward release an archetype that gets it for less investment and without the nerf".
And yeah, mythic resilience is so out of whack that a cynic would look at it and say "someone got sick of people saying the system favors martials over casters so decided to show what that actually looks like." Mythic in general was a miss, but WoI actually having mythic resilience on every save as a thing was even more WTF worthy than the way rewrite fate just obsoletes so many other things.
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I think the main draw for a lot of people to Pathfinder 2e is that they didn't need to spend a lot of time homebrewing solutions to the written rules.
The more situations like the Oracle not having clear spells known or their things like it that come up the more GMs need to homebrew a fix to keep things moving. The typoes and smaller print issues have always been there but things like this are not the same kind of issue.
For my part I like to homebrew when I want things to work differently than what is written, but I don't want to homebrew because what is written doesn't work.
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...or to two different chapters of an AP feeling completely disjointed...That's always been a thing with AP books and I hope the move to single volumes releasing at the same time will help since they can be written at the same time instead of staggered. At least, I hope so.
While having an Adventure Path as a single book does allow us to have a single author to write the whole thing with less complication (as is the case with "Bastion of Blasphemies") at this point, we're hiring multiple authors to write them in the same way we did before. We've had authors write their sections at the same time for years. This isn't really changing. What IS changing is that we now get to develop the entire thing as a single book rather than three books. We get to edit it as a single book rather than three books. And we get to adjust the schedule a bit more flexibly to account for some adventures needing more time in the "oven" than others without worrying about the grind of the monthly schedule. Hopefully those changes will allow for Adventure Paths to feel less disjointed... but frankly, any project with multiple authors on it is going to run that risk. It's our job as developers to minimize that risk, and again... one book is easier to manage that way than three (or six for that matter).
Having a single author in theory helps, but very few authors are able to do a full Adventure Path on the schedule we need them to be written. Alternately, having author 1 write their part, then giving that to author 2 to read and write their part, and so on, would potentially help... but that pushes the writing window out even further. For that, we'd probably have to start working on Adventure Paths even further out than we already do, which would disrupt the schedule even more.
Adventure Paths are among the most complex things we publish, and we do a LOT of work to make them as good as we can make them. We learn from each one we do as well. And a big part of that learning is hearing back constructive feedback from folks who have read them or played them or run them. And this feedback is MUCH more helpful if it's detailed. All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.
All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.
What's the best place to do that? There's lots of feedback out there these days but it's kind of scattered all over the place, so if there's a place where such things can get put that they'll be seen, that would be good to know.
A challenge with reviewing APs specifically is how long they take to run, so usually by time I can review it, it's been out for years. But if you want me to tell you all the ways in which Fists of the Ruby Phoenix is great, I don't mind. :D (Seriously, that one is so good I ran it twice and both groups completed it.)
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All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.What's the best place to do that? There's lots of feedback out there these days but it's kind of scattered all over the place, so if there's a place where such things can get put that they'll be seen, that would be good to know.
A challenge with reviewing APs specifically is how long they take to run, so usually by time I can review it, it's been out for years. But if you want me to tell you all the ways in which Fists of the Ruby Phoenix is great, I don't mind. :D (Seriously, that one is so good I ran it twice and both groups completed it.)
If you want me to see it personally, the best place is to post here on the forums, preferably in the associated areas with that product. I'm also somewhat active over on the 2E Pathfinder Reddit scene.
And reviews of simply READING an Adventure Path are fine and welcome as well.
Adventure Paths are among the most complex things we publish, and we do a LOT of work to make them as good as we can make them. We learn from each one we do as well. And a big part of that learning is hearing back constructive feedback from folks who have read them or played them or run them. And this feedback is MUCH more helpful if it's detailed. All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.
I have written six Paizo Plus Reviews so far, five of them about Lost Omens lore books. And I started with the most useful, so they rated 4 or 5 stars and I had few criticisms. I chronicled my first efforts, Paizo Plus Email Invitations for Reviews, and received some guidance from Maya Coleman.
I had planned to review the Strength of Thousands adventure path modules Kindled Magic, Spoken on the Song Wind, and Hurricane's Howl as soon as we finish Hurricane's Howl. The other adventure paths I played were written of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 (Rise of the Runelords) and Pathfinder 1st Edition (Jade Regent, Iron Gods, and Ironfang Invasion), and I consider my experience with the 3.5 Rise of the Runelords to be out of date (remember how much of a party-killer Xanesha was in that version?). I would appreciate some guidance what Paizo hopes for out of the reviews. I was simply planning to give information on how well each module could fit players' tastes.
The lack of formatting on those reviews limits me to one paragraph. My usual walls of text need formatting for readability.
In general, the quality of Paizo adventure paths have increased over the decades. They are better balanced, more engaging, and more flavorful. On the other hand, some adventure paths are experiments in unusual themes or settings, and experiments can have failures. I will finish the Strength of Thousands campaign in about two years, because I am adding side quests from Pathfinder Society scenarios to let a seven-player non-combat-optimized party earn experience points. So I cannot run a post-remaster adventure path anytime soon. I sometimes buy an adventure path as source material without running them, but I do not read those from beginning to end, so I cannot review them.
I sometimes create a Gamemastering thread that discusses my experience in running game sessions, and I describe my campaigns there. The thread Common Sense Versus The Plot about my Strength of Thousands campaign had many different people comparing how different GMs run that adventure path. My players like the laid-back style in my campaign, but another GM made it a meat-grinder.
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...or to two different chapters of an AP feeling completely disjointed...That's always been a thing with AP books and I hope the move to single volumes releasing at the same time will help since they can be written at the same time instead of staggered. At least, I hope so.While having an Adventure Path as a single book does allow us to have a single author to write the whole thing with less complication (as is the case with "Bastion of Blasphemies") at this point, we're hiring multiple authors to write them in the same way we did before. We've had authors write their sections at the same time for years. This isn't really changing. What IS changing is that we now get to develop the entire thing as a single book rather than three books. We get to edit it as a single book rather than three books. And we get to adjust the schedule a bit more flexibly to account for some adventures needing more time in the "oven" than others without worrying about the grind of the monthly schedule. Hopefully those changes will allow for Adventure Paths to feel less disjointed... but frankly, any project with multiple authors on it is going to run that risk. It's our job as developers to minimize that risk, and again... one book is easier to manage that way than three (or six for that matter).
Having a single author in theory helps, but very few authors are able to do a full Adventure Path on the schedule we need them to be written. Alternately, having author 1 write their part, then giving that to author 2 to read and write their part, and so on, would potentially help... but that pushes the writing window out even further. For that, we'd probably have to start working on Adventure Paths even further out than we already do, which would disrupt the schedule even more.
Adventure Paths are among the most complex things we publish, and we do a LOT of work to make them as good as we can make them. We learn from each one we do as well. And a big part of that learning is...
The editing advantage once all adventures are compiled I think will be a plus.
I'm of a mixed mind on social media errata or rule updates. For some real egregious stuff I'd like a quicker update. For items the community disagrees on or are unclear but don't impact the game seriously, then I don't need a fast update.
It's obvious that to power gamers the wizard is a fairly weak class, but power gamers are only one portion of the community. Wizards are fine to a lot of players less interested in optimization. They have fun with the class and are effective. So Paizo doesn't need to update the wizard to appeal to a narrow community segment like my group. I know my group and I are a sliver of the overall gaming community and Paizo is appealing to a wide audience.
I definitely don't want a game with rules decided by random developer making comment on discord or a social media outlet. That's not great at all. If errata is released, it should be official for those that want official company rules provided. That takes time to gain consensus or write a rule that solves the problem.
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Yeah +1 to devs not ad hoc correcting things. Go read sage advice for 5e and you'll see why I think that. No disrespect for jeremy crawford but it's very apparent he was firing off rulings with zero forethought. Maybe for real problems like you mentioned but otherwise.
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Although I do think there has been a real drop in the consistency of rules writing post-remaster, I don't actually think that's the main issue for me: really, I'd be absolutely fine with a drop in quality if the underlying assumption was that things are in a healthy enough place that it'll pick back up in the future. What worries me much more is that behind the scenes, it appears the developers are severely burnt out from constantly working under crisis conditions over extended periods of time: one former Paizo employee mentioned they were working 11-hour workdays, and another said they were severely burnt out from the company's production schedule, and the only thing that was keeping them around was the free healthcare. That, to me, is not the sign of a company that's in a healthy spot. The remaster added a lot more books to an already packed production pipeline, and that kind of addition tends to come with crunch and burnout that doesn't seem to have been...
I am getting concerned the more I hear about the working conditions. I wonder if it's something we should make a bigger stink about. I'm aware it's a common problem in gaming and similar industries but I'd love the people making one of my fave things to work proper hours.
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I'm of a mixed mind on social media errata or rule updates.
My big problem with social media/podcast/streaming errata is that I only find out second [or third, or forth...] hand if i hear about them at all. There is no place that collects them to easily reference so even when i do hear about them I have to wait for someone else to drops a link to them. This is like the days when I had to save links to every Dev comment on rules in the 3.0/3.5 times in the forums and it's not a fond memory.
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I'm of a mixed mind on social media errata or rule updates.My big problem with social media/podcast/streaming errata is that I only find out second [or third, or forth...] hand if i hear about them at all. There is no place that collects them to easily reference so even when i do hear about them I have to wait for someone else to drops a link to them. This is like the days when I had to save links to every Dev comment on rules in the 3.0/3.5 times in the forums and it's not a fond memory.
Social media updates shouldn't be a substitution for a proper errata/FAQ page. But they're great for getting seriously broken things fixed quickly, and for a back and forth about where the issues are.
Like, they could fix the Oracle repertoire with a forum post and then get it into the next round of errata whenever that happens. It'd still give people something to work with a lot faster than the current "figure it out for yourselves, we have nothing to say about anything, and we don't even know when errata will start again" policy.
I mean, the only reason we know Rogue's Resilience isn't an error is because of social media, after all.
(That said, answering things in videos or on Discord is the absolute worst way to do it because you can't link to Discord and having to watch a video to figure out if it's relevant is absurdly time consuming.)
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For social media errata to work, there has to be a person who can just answer questions authoritatively without concern of later being over ruled and I don’t think PF2 has that. Identifying a problem is not the same thing as having an internal consensus about how to fix it, and the fix to some issues probably involve waiting for other aspects of the production company than players might expect (light layout editors) before the issue can be considered resolved in a manner ready to publish, even unofficially to social media.
For example, I remember when the second book of the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix came out, people started immediately asking about a feat that granted master proficiency in either unarmed attacks or spells, and Mark Seifter immediately jumped in to tell us that feat was going to be an immediate candidate for errata because it clearly violated the games design philosophy around martial arts/caster proficiency gating, but it would be a year )at least, maybe 2 or 3) before there was ever anything officially said about it. So if you didn’t carefully word a search of these forums that brought up that one specific post, there was no clue anywhere that this feat, that had many player salivating for how it basically let any character become a hybrid fish with 2 class feats, was out of line and going to be completely changed at some point in the future.
This was a feat that essentially broke the math of the game, and was clearly not right to anyone who was familiar with PF2 balance, but also, it only broke the game in a very localized area that was pretty easily handled by GMs because it was an uncommon, higher level option. It was also in a book that was probably difficult to justify paying basically the entire development team to spend even a hour trying to fix because no future sales were going to be impacted by any change or lack of change. Eventually the AP got reprinted and the feat was changed, but it was only because a developer spent unpaid labor to come tell us that the feat was broken that anyone knew that there was something in the works.
It is not really reasonable to expect developers to do unpaid work to interact with customers beyond the formal events that are scheduled into the year (like conventions). You can’t just hire one developer for that purpose either, because players want answers and someone who is spending their work time responding to customer questions is not someone who is spending their time working with the rest of the development team balancing and evaluating potential changes and errata.
It super sucks that the plan to do two errata passes a year couldn’t stick for even a full year, but it is probably one of the hardest business decisions to try to make in advance how much time (and thus money) can be given over to the errata process in advance each year, and it has to be one of the first budgets to cut when product deadlines are approaching. To get errata that has been looked over and approved by some of the most expensive eyes in the company before getting released, the process is not going to be social media-levels of fast or responsive.
I do think it is better not to get half baked changes that potentially conflict with other rules or changes or realities about what is going to be published in future books, than to have and under qualified person making gut instinct rulings that will later have to be retracted if they don’t fit into books or production schedules. Especially if you have to scour multiple corners of the internet to potentially find those changes.
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That example doesn't make the point you seem to think it does. Imagine if Mark hadn't said something. Now we have a build enabling, game changing option sitting in a book for a couple of years with no indication from anyone that it's not intentional.
That's going to put enormous pressure on GMs to allow it because of all the builds it enables that literally no other option in the game does. People make characters with it, use it, get used to it, and then suddenly out of nowhere one day it's gone.
People would be furious at having the rug pulled out from under them like that. And they'd have a point. This is not how game communication works in 2026. Expectations are not what they were in 2010. Letting people think a known issue is fine for a couple of years only to spring a character breaking change on them later is a great way to piss people off, and it doesn't have to happen since they already know there's a problem.
Mark posting about that saved everyone a lot of grief. It was unquestionably a good thing. The problem here wasn't with that at all: it was with that it took so long to get it actually fixed.
Inner Radiance Torrent was the same thing when it came out. The scaling was broken, making it one of the best scaling spells in the game. It was also wrong. Except that one is Common and in a mainline book, so it doesn't have the same excuse of "well a GM can just say its uncommon and not allow it so its fine". We knew it was wrong because someone (probably Mark again) told us it was wrong and would be corrected. That took literally 3 years, for something they knew was wrong right when the book came out. That's absurd in its own right, but at least there was some warning something was wrong with it all that time.
We got a taste of how this plays out with Rogue's Resilience. The one where people couldn't figure out if it was an error or not because it's so out of line with how everything else works. That spawned what, a year of folks trying to guess what was going on there until we found out that it was deliberate? That was in no way better for the game.
The idea that saying nothing until springing updates one day is better is not borne out by how things have gone with this stuff, especially when they can't bring updates in anything even vaguely resembling a timely manner and now have broken their own schedule for it with nothing planned at all.
Likewise, the idea that the only options are "formal errata that takes forever to put out" and "haphazard guesses posted on the forums" is a false dichotomy. Paizo leadership needs to view fixing errors as part of the process and budget time for it. The fact that they're not is why this thread exists: the number of problems is piling up far faster than they're being addressed and its damaging the quality of the game as a whole.
Someone wrote Remaster Oracle and thus someone knows how many spells it should have in its repertoire. This is not a hard thing to fix, at all. If somehow someone doesn't know that, it shouldn't take very long to figure out because it's a basic function of every spontaneous spellcasting class and there's lots of examples of how it works. The fact that it's just sat in a self-contradictory state causing confusion for 13 months is frankly unacceptable, and the idea that it would be somehow worse if someone chimed in to clarify it is absurd.
Especially since its not even the first time its happened: Remaster Oracle started with the same problem with its spells per day. It took six months to get an errata fixing that, and that's the most basic function of a spellcasting class. PFS had a ruling up almost immediately upon the book's official release. So saying Paizo can't do this doesn't really hold water when Paizo has already done it once before on the same class, before Paizo did a half-baked errata and broke another part of it.
And I mean, that kind of blows this whole argument up. If the only way this can be done well is by very slowly issuing official errata, the official errata should be of higher quality, right? Yet it was an official errata that created the repertoire problem by only half-fixing the original error.
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For social media errata to work, there has to be a person who can just answer questions authoritatively without concern of later being over ruled and I don’t think PF2 has that.
Two lead designers answering questions on Twitter did not really work out that well for D&D5, especially when they contradicted each other or the rule books.
Getting that mess under control with the "sage advice" page must have been quite some work, and i don't think anybody would be eager to repeat that.Still, a hint here or there what the developers plan to release would be really nice. Devs, please talk to Maya about it!
The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity.
The reason we didn’t get an errata on the expected time line isn’t because no one wanted to do it, it’s because the money wasn’t there to pay employees to do it the right way. That could be because other projects took up more of the labor budget than expected, the cost of publishing this last year has been incredibly difficult to forecast and budget for, or a sustainable errata process has yet to be fully materialized in house. This isn’t a new problem and the fact that the 2 game developers that people point to as going above and beyond to make the errata process feel good to the fan base have left the company seems like a good indicator to me that direct developer engagement with fans who want immediate rules rulings for their games is not a viable long term strategy.
That example doesn't make the point you seem to think it does. Imagine if Mark hadn't said something. Now we have a build enabling, game changing option sitting in a book for a couple of years with no indication from anyone that it's not intentional.
That's going to put enormous pressure on GMs to allow it because of all the builds it enables that literally no other option in the game does. People make characters with it, use it, get used to it, and then suddenly out of nowhere one day it's gone.
People would be furious at having the rug pulled out from under them like that. And they'd have a point. This is not how game communication works in 2026. Expectations are not what they were in 2010. Letting people think a known issue is fine for a couple of years only to spring a character breaking change on them later is a great way to piss people off, and it doesn't have to happen since they already know there's a problem.
Mark posting about that saved everyone a lot of grief. It was unquestionably a good thing. The problem here wasn't with that at all: it was with that it took so long to get it actually fixed.
Alternative perspective: Mark said nothing. Players who have access to the option make characters, play them for years. Eventually errat comes out with the change and explanation why. Tables decide either to just play on with the old rules because they have been working at the table, or not, because it feels broken. It’s level 12 or 14 feats, so it doesn’t even effect PFS characters (or at least, very, very few, and no one spends 3 years sitting around in limbo because one developer suggested on social media that a change was coming that may or may not have ever been fully made.
Like I get appreciating Mark’s comment. The feat felt too good to be true to me too. But did his comment really end up improving the relationship between Paizo and its player base? Or did it make some people feel like they could never play a character they wanted to play, when they probably could have in the time it took for the change to be made, one that still really enables most of the same characters, with just minor tweaks?
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I think people are overcomplicating stuff.
Having a developer who's responsible for rules/balance stuff, or even for a part of them, say to Maya and in turn they inform us here that (as an example here):
"I spoke with the developer who did the remaster of the Psychic, and they told me that their metrics showed the class as ok, hence why there weren't any buffs, and that the nerf to IW was because the framework for force damage had them lower the damage"
or "I spoke to the dev who wrote the monster mythic abilities rules, the reason Mythic Resilience is different than Mythic resistance is X".
would go a terribly long way towards alleviating a ton of the issues that frequently pop up.
This would be terrible for Paizo, it would publicly confirm they’re incompetent or out of touch.
Paizo is wise to this, thus the transparent lies when they reverted the published remaster dying rules that 90% of the community hated. Of course it wasn’t an error (Mark had said so, that it was always supposed to work that way!), it was either “we made a decision that you all universally hated, and we’ll probably do it again with no recourse when there’s fewer eyes on the game” or “we have individual dev who sneak in their personal hobby horses as fait accompli and we mostly don’t or can’t do anything about except in extremis” (I think this what happened with the rogue save improvement).
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The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity.
6 months to fix one obvious error and 13 months and counting to fix another obvious error caused by the first fix is the most stretched definition of "rushed" I've ever heard of in my life. Government bureaucracy moves faster than this.
You're making up a scenario where someone answers it off the cuff without checking with anyone else and then at some point later it's decided that answer is wrong. You do understand that runs the risk of happening every time PFS issues a ruling before errata comes out, right? Like that literally happened with archetypes and what counts as a "spellcasting feature": it wasn't clear in the CRB. PFS issued a ruling that it was the basic spellcasting benefits feat. Player Core comes out and changes it to the Dedication feat. People went "okay", and moved on.
It's also not that hard for someone to ask someone else. "Hey X, I think this should be 4 to match the spell slots. Is that right?" If yes, there's your answer. If no, then people need to get on the same page and it'll need to be sorted out. But it's pretty easy to ask that question before posting an answer on the forum.
The most likely outcome here is not "someone posts an answer that turns out to be wrong and everyone loses their minds." The most likely outcome is "someone posts an answer, it's right, and the problem goes away."
And hell, even if the answer was wrong and changed later... it wouldn't be the first time, and it wouldn't be worse than the uncertainty we have now where everyone is just guessing and there's table variation in the most basic function of a spellcaster.
The current situation is worse than even the bad case outcome you propose, and that's not the most likely outcome of doing something.
The reason we didn’t get an errata on the expected time line isn’t because no one wanted to do it, it’s because the money wasn’t there to pay employees to do it the right way. That could be because other projects took up more of the labor budget than expected, the cost of publishing this last year has been incredibly difficult to forecast and budget for, or a sustainable errata process has yet to be fully materialized in house. This isn’t a new problem and the fact that the 2 game developers that people point to as going above and beyond to make the errata process feel good to the fan base have left the company seems like a good indicator to me that direct developer engagement with fans who want immediate rules rulings for their games is not a viable long term strategy.
That's a management failure, at the end of the day. This stuff is a necessary part of the process, and management allocating no time or budget to it is a mistake.
Like I get appreciating Mark’s comment. The feat felt too good to be true to me too. But did his comment really end up improving the relationship between Paizo and its player base? Or did it make some people feel like they could never play a character they wanted to play, when they probably could have in the time it took for the change to be made, one that still really enables most of the same characters, with just minor tweaks?
I mean, if a GM wanted to allow it anyway, they could have. Just like people are still creating new legacy Oracles today and people still used Inner Radiance Torrent even knowing it was incorrect.
Marks comment was great and it definitely improved the relationship between Paizo and the player base. Giving players some certainty that it's not just them and something is off about that is extremely useful. It also showed they cared about the state of things.
There's an entire thread here about the lack of communication and lowering product quality, so how could you possibly think the communication we used to have and now lack was not helping? The lack of it is literally part of the problem now.
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I think people are overcomplicating stuff.
Having a developer who's responsible for rules/balance stuff, or even for a part of them, say to Maya and in turn they inform us here that (as an example here):
"I spoke with the developer who did the remaster of the Psychic, and they told me that their metrics showed the class as ok, hence why there weren't any buffs, and that the nerf to IW was because the framework for force damage had them lower the damage"
or "I spoke to the dev who wrote the monster mythic abilities rules, the reason Mythic Resilience is different than Mythic resistance is X".
would go a terribly long way towards alleviating a ton of the issues that frequently pop up.
Heck! we have whole threads dedicated to errata that one can peruse to get a list of questions, and then grab the relevant dev, to give us at least some answers.
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I'm not talking about more complicated technical issues, that would require a TON of work to actually fix (instance of damage), but even simple things are left in the void.
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Having absolutely no communication, not even aknowledging the issues that appear, is not the correct way to go forwards imo.
The really sad thing is that Maya tried this when xe first started. Xe appeared on the forum, said hello, and not long after saw a thread with a rules question. Maya said xe would go ask and try to get an answer.
Spoiler alert: that answer never came and Maya no longer makes posts like that. And that is absolutely not on Maya at all. Maya tried and we appreciate that a ton.
But Maya can't do it alone and very clearly is not getting support on rules clarifications from the rest of the company. It's a real shame, because an occasional "hey I got an answer from the rules folks and it's X, which will be in a published clarification later" would do heaps of good.
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The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity.
I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.
I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.
Being frustrated by broken promises and the way things feel on a personal level is totally legitimate feedback to give Paizo. They tell us this all the time and it is not the customer’s job to be patient or understanding of the complex issues that drive business decisions away from their preferred outcomes.
From my perspective though, Paizo isn’t selling “functional RPG rules,” because they are actually giving that part away for free. I totally understand feeling like the game is the thing you are buying when you buy a Pathfinder 2nd edition Rulebook, from a player-side perspective, but by nature of the ORC license, the mechanics are free to anyone to use, develop further, and even to repackage and resell. That puts errata into a difficult space to budget around, because it is quite literally an unlimited money sink attached to the actual product that Paizo sells to keep the lights on. The company therefore has to be pretty careful not to over budget resources to a product that customers see as an essential part of the pathfinder experience, but is almost entirely just marketing and customer service.
I think it is important to recognize that the company is giving away 50-75% (maybe even more) of the labor that creates the product that they actually sell and that it is important not to over pressure the developers who doing 100% of that product-less labor to do even more labor that can’t make money. Arcane Mark was a fairly brilliant approach for Mark to take to (potentially) monetize some of this free labor, but I have no idea if it was enough to make the labor worth doing, AND Mark didn’t have the authority to make actual game rulings on his own that Paizo was under an obligation to officiate into their rules. Not even Jason Bulmahn is in a position on his live streams to do more than say “this is how I utilize these rules.”
Imagine if Mark’s comment about the 6th Pillar Archetype was just a quick, off the cuff comment and not a commitment to make any changes when he said it. What if Fists never got a hardcover edition and no one in the company ever went back and changed the feat? Had he said nothing, players might argue about the power of the feat back and forth, and speculated about why no other such proficiency granting feat ever got published afterwards, but from the company’s perspective, there is no obligation being created to customers that Paizo is on the hook to pay for. By saying “yes this is a mistake we will will fix,” Mark was obligating Paizo to spend money on something it might never have a way to recuperate, and that is something companies have to be real careful about, or else you get customer expectations sky high and the economy of publishing and internationally shipping books (your actual product) might flip on its head in the middle of a print cycle that might nearly sink your entire company. Now you have a situation where your player base is lionizing a developer who is so passionate about the game they are stretching themselves thin to provide advice that is being read as company endorsed rules text, but to actually make it so, other employees have to divert their labor budgets from somewhere else, or leave a promised fix unresolved.
So yes, I do think a sustainable, well implemented errata process is far more complicated than players are going to inherently see, and being transparent about those complexities is difficult because they have to involve business decisions that are not necessarily going to be popular with the player base, like telling enthusiastic developers not to overcommit company resources. I think Paizo has been trying to do better and better with these things, but sometimes it looks like taking two steps backwards, when the initial step forward was actually just sideways to an actual, realizable vision for what the errata process can functionally be.
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For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.
For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.
I guess I sort of think it is ok to let this be a fan provided service that happens here on the forums. Players ask their rules questions, discuss them, see if there are consensus reached that cause those discussions to go away, and then developers can look and see if those are implementable in the products and line up with underlying game principles or if they need further tweaking. The rules are free to everyone so, in the vast majority of cases, this is not labor Paizo had to do themselves, nor will official rulings inherently make everyone’s games inherently better.
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I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.
Being frustrated by broken promises and the way things feel on a personal level is totally legitimate feedback to give Paizo. They tell us this all the time and it is not the customer’s job to be patient or understanding of the complex issues that drive business decisions away from their preferred outcomes.
From my perspective though, Paizo isn’t selling “functional RPG rules,” because they are actually giving that part away for free. I totally understand feeling like the game is the thing you are buying when you buy a Pathfinder 2nd edition Rulebook, from a player-side perspective, but by nature of the ORC license, the mechanics are free to anyone to use, develop further, and even to repackage and resell. That puts errata into a difficult space to budget around, because it is quite literally an unlimited money sink attached to the actual product that Paizo sells to keep the lights on. The company therefore has to be pretty careful not to over budget resources to a product that customers see as an essential part of the pathfinder experience, but is almost entirely just marketing and customer service.
The choice to give away the meat of their system is a choice they have made freely. It doesn't free them from the expectation - that they themselves have created - to provide errata for these rules.
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I would not trade the ORC license for errata every 3 months.
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I think people are overcomplicating stuff.
Having a developer who's responsible for rules/balance stuff, or even for a part of them, say to Maya and in turn they inform us here that (as an example here):
"I spoke with the developer who did the remaster of the Psychic, and they told me that their metrics showed the class as ok, hence why there weren't any buffs, and that the nerf to IW was because the framework for force damage had them lower the damage"
or "I spoke to the dev who wrote the monster mythic abilities rules, the reason Mythic Resilience is different than Mythic resistance is X".
would go a terribly long way towards alleviating a ton of the issues that frequently pop up.
Heck! we have whole threads dedicated to errata that one can peruse to get a list of questions, and then grab the relevant dev, to give us at least some answers.
---
I'm not talking about more complicated technical issues, that would require a TON of work to actually fix (instance of damage), but even simple things are left in the void.
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Having absolutely no communication, not even aknowledging the issues that appear, is not the correct way to go forwards imo.
As a long time DM and player, I tend to disagree. Sometimes table fixes work better than anything Paizo might put out. A group that finds a problem comes up with a table fix that the group likes can often work better than an official ruling from Paizo.
I think the biggest problems I've seen in these games is when a rule is clear, but broken in some way either overpowered or underpowered with overpowered being a bigger problem is a player built his whole character to exploit the overpowered nature of something. It causes the DM headaches. Then quick errata can help because a lot of players don't enjoy a DM tired of some broken combination causing game issues. That's when an official ruling can really help avoid table conflict.
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For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.I guess I sort of think it is ok to let this be a fan provided service that happens here on the forums. Players ask their rules questions, discuss them, see if there are consensus reached that cause those discussions to go away, and then developers can look and see if those are implementable in the products and line up with underlying game principles or if they need further tweaking. The rules are free to everyone so, in the vast majority of cases, this is not labor Paizo had to do themselves, nor will official rulings inherently make everyone’s games inherently better.
PFS makes that a less attractive solution. A good chunk of players purchase a book specifically for allowing PFS play. But this is why I emphasize the really nasty problems only.
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As a long time DM and player, I tend to disagree. Sometimes table fixes work better than anything Paizo might put out. A group that finds a problem comes up with a table fix that the group likes can often work better than an official ruling from Paizo
While that can be true, when you go to multiple tables you have multiple fixes. So you have to both unlearn the table you were at last and learn the new method. Having an offial stance at least allows go to a new table and when you ask about houserules, it'll be listed. With an ambiguous rule or non-rule [like minions outside combat], it might not come up as it's not replacing or altering a rule. Leaving things as 'ask your DM' rules is a bit pain in the behind for me at least.
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I don't feel the quality is getting worse, but I'm not really accepting the excuses any more. When there's always an excuse, even if its always different because of whatever is happening, that ceases to be a one-off event, and exposes a pattern of planning that can not survive the craziness of the real world.
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Having read through this thread, it seems to me that the vast majority of complaints were as valid as before the Remaster as they are now. Off the top of my head, the mutagenist alchemist research field did not actually have a benefit or Battle Medicine may not have required a free hand. There were other issues that were corrected over time, but it never happened as quickly as people liked. At some point, the GM has to make a ruling for their table, even when playing a system with overall consistent rules.
In fact, the Remaster was an improvement, since Player Core improved previously-subpar classes like the witch and the alchemist. The classes that receive the most criticism (inventor, psychic more recently) were published before the Remaster; post-Remaster classes like the animist, exemplar, commander and guardian have been well-received IIRC/
With regards to adventures, some Remaster APs have been better than others, but again, it was always thus. IMHO Shades of Blood is better than Abomination Vaults.
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As a long time DM and player, I tend to disagree. Sometimes table fixes work better than anything Paizo might put out. A group that finds a problem comes up with a table fix that the group likes can often work better than an official ruling from Paizo.I think people are overcomplicating stuff.
Having a developer who's responsible for rules/balance stuff, or even for a part of them, say to Maya and in turn they inform us here that (as an example here):
"I spoke with the developer who did the remaster of the Psychic, and they told me that their metrics showed the class as ok, hence why there weren't any buffs, and that the nerf to IW was because the framework for force damage had them lower the damage"
or "I spoke to the dev who wrote the monster mythic abilities rules, the reason Mythic Resilience is different than Mythic resistance is X".
would go a terribly long way towards alleviating a ton of the issues that frequently pop up.
Heck! we have whole threads dedicated to errata that one can peruse to get a list of questions, and then grab the relevant dev, to give us at least some answers.
---
I'm not talking about more complicated technical issues, that would require a TON of work to actually fix (instance of damage), but even simple things are left in the void.
---
Having absolutely no communication, not even aknowledging the issues that appear, is not the correct way to go forwards imo.
With all due respect, the fact that a group is often able to patch the rules is beside the point. Ambiguities should not be allowed to persist, especially in a game as heavily codified as Pathfinder 2E, where so much of the value of the 1,000+ page core rules is in providing a consistent, clear foundation upon which all the fiddly bits will rest.
Let me give an example that cropped up on my table earlier today. Our group had a disagreement about the way delay works (the specifics aren't terribly important, but interested parties can look here for the gist of it). The way this falls could easily be the difference between a character living or dying. Yet that thread is now over six years (!) old, and the issue has never been settled. No designer feedback has been provided. Nothing about it appears in the FAQ (that I can find), nor was the wording cleared up in the remaster. Perhaps Paizo simply doesn't consider the rules to be ambiguous, but the fact that this exact debate has sprung up in multiple other places online (for example, here is a thread on Reddit) would tend to indicate otherwise.
How is something this foundational in the core rules going answered for more than six years--including through a remaster--good for anyone? Especially when the entire matter could be settled with a single sentence? I just don't get it.
So yes, I'm worried about quality. I don't know that it has gotten worse since the remaster, but it doesn't appear to have gotten any better.
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That's a management failure, at the end of the day. This stuff is a necessary part of the process, and management allocating no time or budget to it is a mistake.
THANK YOU. I simply don't understand why so few people seem to get this. One thing decades in corporate America taught me is that "it costs too much, there aren't enough resources, it isn't our area of expertise" and the like are ultimately just euphemisms for management failure. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well, and when it isn't done well the responsibility ultimately rests with the people in charge.
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I feel like there have been some struggles,But the OGL Scandal, Need for Remastering, The USA swinging hard to the right, tariffs, and Diamond Distribution have been a steady stream of punches coming their way. I have noticed some minor bumps but I think they are doing well overall.
The website...was disappointing but out of my area.
I will just say yes, there have been some slips and things that need to be worked on. I would love classes to be worked on rather than keep adding new ones as well.
But I have been playing 36 years, and most of the games I have played, many of which I did and still love, are a clown car compared to even just past year of Paizo. Even my issues I am having, including a couple with Psychic, are very easy for me to fix, while some games it's a lot of "I don't know what to do with this."
I expect things will solidify. Most books I have really enjoyed. I look forward to seeing what they do with the Hellfire Crisis.
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That's a management failure, at the end of the day. This stuff is a necessary part of the process, and management allocating no time or budget to it is a mistake.THANK YOU. I simply don't understand why so few people seem to get this. One thing decades in corporate America taught me is that "it costs too much, there aren't enough resources, it isn't our area of expertise" and the like are ultimately just euphemisms for management failure. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well, and when it isn't done well the responsibility ultimately rests with the people in charge.
Indeed. Because they are the ones making the big difficult decisions that keep the ship afloat.
Given the recent errata and its issues. I'm starting to feel less charitable than I was after the Psychic demaster.
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Yeah the instance of damage errata feels like a tragic case of "be careful what you wish for."
We're considering ignoring it entirely at my table because of how much it can warp the game.
Yeah the instance of damage errata feels like a tragic case of "be careful what you wish for."
We're considering ignoring it entirely at my table because of how much it can warp the game.
Tbh, I prefer a ruling I can disagree with rather than not a ruling at all.
As I said (I think in a different thread) I think it's much easier for us playing in different tables to have something and then houserule it differently if the group doesn't like it rather than having nothing and having to guess/remember each table how is running an unclear rule.
I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.
I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundary implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.
This is official errata, which means it is the PFS rule as well unless PFS issues a ruling stating otherwise. And for PFS to outright undo an errata would be wild.
I don't know what Foundry is going to do given how much pushback there is to this. Maybe they'll add the new version but leave the old version there as well. I know foundry devs have been asking Paizo for clarifications as that's where some of the updates have been coming from. so they're at least looking at the new rules.
I sure hope they don't remove the old implementation because going back to doing all this manually would be a real hassle.
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I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.This is official errata, which means it is the PFS rule as well unless PFS issues a ruling stating otherwise. And for PFS to outright undo an errata would be wild.
I don't know what Foundry is going to do given how much pushback there is to this. Maybe they'll add the new version but leave the old version there as well. I know foundry devs have been asking Paizo for clarifications as that's where some of the updates have been coming from. so they're at least looking at the new rules.
I sure hope they don't remove the old implementation because going back to doing all this manually would be a real hassle.
You mistake my meaning. I'd rather Paizo not make errata at all, so we're stuck going with whatever PFS or Foundry does than release errata that actively makes the game worse. Sometimes, no answer is better than a bad answer.
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As there has been no official blog post about the errata being released, and the errata keeps changing in places, it seems like this is an errata in progress and not the final result.
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God I hope so