[Pathfinder] Just to kick a man when he's down.

[Roy]

http://paizo.com/paizo/blog

Feast Burn your eyes out.

Fixed.

hogarth: Which makes the Fail not realizing that ahead of time, and still not getting it when spelled out in detail, with illustrations.

Frank: Which is why they've done that and broken a bunch of other stuff instead.

Edit: Apparently staves have 10 charges and can be recharged, just by casting a spell into it. Cool, so now they last forever. Combined with the Dispel nerf and it's all about buff spam for the win lulz.

[hogarth]

I think he's been pretty clear all along -- if you hate 3.5, you'll hate the Pathfinder RPG too.

The problem is that what most people wanted was "Just like 3.5 but with some broken crap fixed."

Maybe, but there's no majority consensus on what the "broken crap" is. For every person who thinks that the fighter is "broken" without a bunch of cool abilities, there's another person who would call a fighter who can do more than 20 points of damage per attack "broken"...

They've made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of fixing any problems. Or even of employing a methodology that could identify problems. That Fighter, for example, is totally unplayable in 3.5. The fact that it even got published indicates that they aren't playing this game. Let alone analyzing anything.

-Username17

Well, they changed a couple of things for the better, IMO (e.g. sorcerers actually get a class feature! a level 1 barbarian can be angry more than once a day!), although they changed a number of things for the worse too (e.g. more powers for wizards...). And 90% of my D&D playing is at low levels, so the relative crappiness of mid-to-high level fighters and monks (say) doesn't affect me too much, so it's hard for me to get worked up about it.

Edit: Apparently staves have 10 charges and can be recharged, just by casting a spell into it. Cool, so now they last forever. Combined with the Dispel nerf and it's all about buff spam for the win lulz.

Just to clarify, you can recharge one staff charge per day (at least in the Beta rules). The real idiocy in the Beta rules is that it's trivially cheap and easy to make any item intelligent, so an intelligent staff can happily cast all kinds of buff spells on the wielder without taking any of the wielder's actions.

[Fuchs]

"Tome of Battle: Book of the 9 Swords" solved most of the fighter/caster unbalance for my group and playstyle.

[Kaelik]

RRAAAAAWGGGGHHH!

20 fucking Charisma? WTF?

Level fucking ten you dipshit. Buy a goddam Cha item.

You can fucking start with a 16 and no racial bonus, you still end up with a fucking 22 Cha at level 10, because you goddam buy a +4 Cha item you fucker.

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK.

Fuck you Pathfinder. Stop sucking so much. You made races have actual positive modifiers, you give a feat every other level. Why the fuck don't you know how to goddam optimize a fucking casting stat?!

[Roy]

Edit: Apparently staves have 10 charges and can be recharged, just by casting a spell into it. Cool, so now they last forever. Combined with the Dispel nerf and it's all about buff spam for the win lulz.

Just to clarify, you can recharge one staff charge per day (at least in the Beta rules). The real idiocy in the Beta rules is that it's trivially cheap and easy to make any item intelligent, so an intelligent staff can happily cast all kinds of buff spells on the wielder without taking any of the wielder's actions.

Awesome, so you don't even need Persist or whatever to turn into a CoDzilla.

To Kaelik's win: It is amusing to note they hate 4.0. Perhaps the reason is because they cannot even grasp 4.0 style 'optimization' which basically consists of putting the high stat number in the stat you actually use and then boost that stat further every chance you get.

Even WotC managed to put their best stat (a 15) in the area where it counts, second best in next most important and so forth. Though that only gets you a 21 at level 10 which is functionally identical. But then you get a +2 for fucking free, so they're still made of Fail.

[hogarth]

RRAAAAAWGGGGHHH!

20 fucking Charisma? WTF?

Level fucking ten you dipshit. Buy a goddam Cha item.

She does have a Cha item. Of course it's an overpriced +2 Cha/+2 Wis item... :/

Even WotC managed to put their best stat (a 15) in the area where it counts, second best in next most important and so forth. Though that only gets you a 21 at level 10 which is functionally identical. But then you get a +2 for fucking free, so they're still made of Fail.

I think the grid they're using is something like: 14, 14, 14, 12 (or 13 for the fighter), 10, 8. That corresponds to a 15/16-point Pathfinder point buy (which is similar-ish to a 25-point 3.5 point buy, but it charges extra for stats above 13 instead of stats above 14). That's a pretty dumb grid to use, but at least they're being consistent.

[Username17]

Maybe, but there's no majority consensus on what the "broken crap" is. For every person who thinks that the fighter is "broken" without a bunch of cool abilities, there's another person who would call a fighter who can do more than 20 points of damage per attack "broken"...

And you're welcome to have that argument at 2nd level. But not at 14th. If the game is compatible, the characters have to be able to fight the monsters out of the books and pass the packaged adventures. The guys they are making can't do those things, which means that they aren't doing their job.

Which isn't surprising, because when I offered to do scientific playtesting for them, Jason said that he was going to ignore all of it because he wasn't concerned what kind of numeric results the game produced (!). So really:

• The open "playtest" is a sham.
• Jason has no idea what he's doing.

So no, nothing worthwhile is going to come out of any of that. It's a titanic pile of wasted effort.

-Username17

[hogarth]

So no, nothing worthwhile is going to come out of any of that. It's a titanic pile of wasted effort.

-Username17

A titanic pile of wasted effort for whom? All it's really cost Paizo is one year's salary for a game designer (what's that, $30K? $40K?). I suspect they'll make at least that much in sales of their core book.

Who knows, though; the game could turn out to be a total financial flop and end up killing their Adventure Path line as well. We'll have to wait and see.

[mean_liar]

All it's really cost Paizo is one year's salary for a game designer (what's that, $30K? $40K?).

Frank, what is the going rate on game design?

[Username17]

All it's really cost Paizo is one year's salary for a game designer (what's that, $30K? $40K?).

Frank, what is the going rate on game design?

Depends. Usually a designer doesn't get paid by the product or by the year, but by the word. So you'd get paid for the writing itself, and it's only a few cents a word. Making game design incredibly poorly paid.

But Jason is on staff. He gets money no matter what he does, so whatever he does or doesn't do doesn't cost them a dime more or less than they were already in for. The real cost is publishing. They're going to have to sell a lot of copies to break even on that.

-Username17

[Roy]

RRAAAAAWGGGGHHH!

20 fucking Charisma? WTF?

Level fucking ten you dipshit. Buy a goddam Cha item.

She does have a Cha item. Of course it's an overpriced +2 Cha/+2 Wis item... :/

Even WotC managed to put their best stat (a 15) in the area where it counts, second best in next most important and so forth. Though that only gets you a 21 at level 10 which is functionally identical. But then you get a +2 for fucking free, so they're still made of Fail.

I think the grid they're using is something like: 14, 14, 14, 12 (or 13 for the fighter), 10, 8. That corresponds to a 15/16-point Pathfinder point buy (which is similar-ish to a 25-point 3.5 point buy, but it charges extra for stats above 13 instead of stats above 14). That's a pretty dumb grid to use, but at least they're being consistent.

Which tells us:

Their default stat system further shafts MAD characters, aka yet another instance of Fighters Do Not Get Nice Things.

The 4th best stat went into the primary stat. And the 4th best off 'Elite Array' is also 12. Fail.

[hogarth]

The 4th best stat went into the primary stat.

yo dawg, I herd you liek stats, so I put a stat into your stat so you can play while you play

[RandomCasualty2]

Depends. Usually a designer doesn't get paid by the product or by the year, but by the word. So you'd get paid for the writing itself, and it's only a few cents a word. Making game design incredibly poorly paid.

Wow... that's a pretty horrible system. It just encourages people to churn out a lot of crap, since 12 horribly balanced PrCs gets paid better than 2 well thought out PrCs.

[Username17]

Depends. Usually a designer doesn't get paid by the product or by the year, but by the word. So you'd get paid for the writing itself, and it's only a few cents a word. Making game design incredibly poorly paid.

Wow... that's a pretty horrible system. It just encourages people to churn out a lot of crap, since 12 horribly balanced PrCs gets paid better than 2 well thought out PrCs.

Yes. That is why the products from White Wolf are the way they are. It takes less time to write a hundred thousand words of poetry and dark brooding glances than it does to balance some rules. And a hundred thousand words at 4 cents a word is 4 grand. Write five of those a year, and you can stop working at Pizza Hut.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

That's a pittance. Wow.

[Caedrus]

That's a pittance. Wow.

And that is exactly why so many "official" game designers tend to suck at their jobs. The business model strongly encourages bad design and won't entice skilled designers.

But then stupid people will say "but these are the guys who got the job! How can you claim to know better than them?" These are the guys who got the job that doesn't pay enough for really talented people to want and work in a system where producing good results doesn't benefit you at all. Only churning out loads of crap.

I personally think this is a large part of the reason the hobby is declining; not just because of videogame competition or whatever. It's because the model is broken.

[sake]

Cone of Cold? Ice Storm?
BURNING HANDS!?

I stopped following the Pathfinder stuff months ago, I take it they never did anything to make Evocation/Direct Damage spells worth a crap? Are they still removing all the SoD's or did that get reverted?

[Psychic Robot]

SoDs are now "save or take something like 10 damage per caster level." Instead of fixing evocation, it seems that the Pathfinder devs are more interested in nerfing SoDs down to evocation's level. And since evocation has an eighth-level spell that does 1d6 damage per caster level, you're just looking at a turd all around.

[virgil]

Makes it (SoDs) vaguely equivalent to empowered disintegrate, since you do an average of 10.5/level with that spell if they fail the save.

[hogarth]

Cone of Cold? Ice Storm?
BURNING HANDS!?

I stopped following the Pathfinder stuff months ago, I take it they never did anything to make Evocation/Direct Damage spells worth a crap? Are they still removing all the SoD's or did that get reverted?

They mentioned in the blog that Ice Storm will make difficult terrain and will give a penalty to Perception (Listen/Spot) checks.

They haven't said anything about save-or-die spells lately. Note that some spells like Flesh to Stone (for example) were never changed, and in fact there's a 6th level spell that allows you to polymorph into a gorgon (complete with petrifying breath weapon) or an androsphinx (complete with terrifying/paralyzing/Str damaging roar).

[Psychic Robot]

How is that different from the 3.5 version?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Because polymorph didn't start giving (Su) abilities until Shapechange (thanks, Andy Collins, you fucknut) at any point. I'm not including those useless PHB2 spells.

(EDIT: Oh, you meant ice storm, NM)

[TOZ]

I'd really like to see Pathfinder be a good game, but I just don't see it happening. Maybe I wait around for PF 2nd Ed.

[Lago PARANOIA]

3rd Edition was completely balogna-fucked, but the things that people actually cared about weren't very hard to fix, except for the blatant inferiority of sword-based classes and how problematic extra tokens got.

I think that if we
- fixed the randomness and RNG of 3rd Edition, which requires nixing a lot of bonuses
- sliced off the useless charisma/constitution stats, made strength = fortitude, intelligence = reflex, dexterity = AC, and wisdom = will,
- Pumped up the sword-based classes powers or hit the spellcasters with the nerf stick
- Tightened up the monster creation rules
- Closed a bunch of spell loopholes
- Fixed the problematic polymorph/extra token rules
- Fixed BAB and save multiclassing
- Fixed prestige class prequisites
- Gave people a lot more feats in general and split feats into 'character development' and 'combat advancement' and didn't make one transferrable to the other
- Tightened up the numbers of the skill system while expanding on the uses
- Fixed caster/noncaster multiclassing. I believe the easiest way to do this would be to go through 4th Edition's route and put everyone one the same power advancement table so grabbing a fireball for your fighter meant trading out your Crack the Shell power
- Eliminated empty levels

Then we could have an revision to be proud of, I think. Except for the creation of a new power structure I don't think it would even be very hard.

[CatharzGodfoot]

- sliced off the useless charisma/constitution stats, made strength = fortitude, intelligence = reflex, dexterity = AC, and wisdom = will,

At that point you might as well get rid of intelligence as well, as it's the odd one out. Just let people take all of the skills that they should have, and put knowledge in its own mechanic.