The Gaming Den

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 5:24 pm**

On a long list of things that I think are crazy, 5-foot squares are up there.

Bearing in mind that the rest of the world uses meters, having '1 meter squares' makes a lot of sense. And Imperial units has a unit that is just a little smaller. 1 yard is equivalent to .91 meters, so making it so you had to count '1s' instead of '5s' seems like a no-brainer. A '5-foot step' becomes a '1 yard step' which also makes a lot of sense - moving 5 feet is a couple of steps for most people. And measure any door in your house - any. Even the front door that can open on both sides is probably less than 5 feet. If you could say '4 yards' and that mean '4 squares' (or hexes, or whatever) that'd be really easy and intuitive. Maps would make more sense; fights would make more sense.

If you keep speeds the same (30' becomes 10 yards/squares and 20' is probably 7 yards [21 feet]) you would have more movement, so that's about the only thing that could be a problem. If that's what you need to address, you just reduce speeds accordingly. If you like medium creatures moving six squares, you give them a speed of 6 yards (18'). You can set small creatures at 4 yards (12') and you maintain the same factor (.6). You could even potentially have creatures with 'in-between' speeds if you wanted. If you had a movement penalty that reduced someone from 6 yards to 5 yards, they'd still move in whole squares.

So yeah, if you're building a heartbreaker, use yards if you like Imperial Units. Your life will be easier.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:09 pm**

GâtFromKI wrote:How can the time spent parsing Path2 be worth it?

Obviously it can't be.

The issue is that Pathfinder 2 doesn't present a "hook." There's no reason to give a shit. It's not the anointed game. It's just some rando game that one of your friends might pick up. It doesn't present any justification for its own existence.

I'm no Ron Edwards fan, but seriously what is the premise of Pathfinder 2? What is it supposed to do better than any of a dozen heartbreakers or major studio releases from the last twenty years? Right now it's a pre-alpha mess, but if we were to hypothetically imagine this thing playtested and edited into something legible, parseable, and playable, so fucking what? What design goals is this fucking thing supposed to even have?

Pathfinder 2 can't meet its objectives because it doesn't have any objectives. They are jumping head first into fiddly questions about how shields should be different from breast plates without answering much more fundamental questions like "What the fuck are you even doing?"

-Username17

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:15 pm**

Zaranthan wrote:
GâtFromKI wrote:The prices of magic armors on page 397 seems to be random, for some reason it's not the price of an armor of that quality + price of rune + price of etching the rune on the armor.
I can't access the document at work, but are the prices actually RANDOM or are they strictly lower for pre-etched armor?

The price of a magic armor is strictly bigger than the price of the armor + the rune + the etching process. eg a +5 armor cost 40 000 gp, it's composed of a legendary armor (6 500 gp) and a +5 rune (a bit less than 27 XXX gp). Even if you add the cost of the etching (10% of the price of the rune), it's still less than 40 000 gp.

...

Well, forget this. For some reason, the price indicated for a +5 rune is the price to upgrade a rune from +4 to +5 instead of the price of a +5 rune. And the price indicated for a +4 rune is the price to upgrade a rune from +3 to +4 instead of the price of a +4 rune. Etc. I guess the system wasn't byzantine enough.

So maybe the price correspond. Whatever. Since I don't really care i won't do the computation.

Small note: fortunately, i'm not the first one to be confused by byzantine layout concerning price. On the official forum, there was a guy who though buying a craft formula and crafting an item was more costly than buying the item. Until he discovered the formula price are listed in sp for some reason...

I'm quite confident some MCs (and players) will use the price of 65 000 gp for a legendary armor - because for some reason the price is listed in sp.

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm no Ron Edwards fan, but seriously what is the premise of Pathfinder 2? What is it supposed to do better than any of a dozen heartbreakers or major studio releases from the last twenty years?

Is "be a troll document designed to confuse the reader and make him feel stupid when he discover his errors" a valid design goal ?

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:42 pm**

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm no Ron Edwards fan, but seriously what is the premise of Pathfinder 2?

I think it's obvious that the premise of PF2 is: 'We want to sell another round of core books to people who already bought our core books.' They've printed enough material that at this point any individual product has increasingly niche appeal; Ultimate Magic sells a lot, but Ultimate Ropes (or whatever they have left to cover) doesn't. PHBs sell super well, but at this point, everyone in the PF fanbase has one, and now even PHBs only sell as that base expands. And I guess that D&D 5E is eating their lunch in that regard because 5E is terrible in many respects, but it's not a baffling byzantine ordeal to start playing.

The design goals of PF1 were: 'change everything just enough to make our game identity distinct and also make our claims of an overhaul fix plausible to those who don't look closely,' then the design goals of PF2 are probably very much the same. They're changing a whole bunch of things, but the only reason for any of the changes is to market themselves as new and improved. And maybe to be as obscurantist as possible, to make it harder to figure out that they aren't improved.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:51 pm**

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:I'm no Ron Edwards fan, but seriously what is the premise of Pathfinder 2?
I think it's obvious that the premise of PF2 is: 'We want to sell another round of core books to people who already bought our core books.'

That makes more sense than my guess: "Parody D&D's shitty development by doing the same thing slightly stupider."

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 7:55 pm**

Iduno wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:I'm no Ron Edwards fan, but seriously what is the premise of Pathfinder 2?
I think it's obvious that the premise of PF2 is: 'We want to sell another round of core books to people who already bought our core books.'
That makes more sense than my guess: "Parody D&D's shitty development by doing the same thing slightly stupider."

But Hackmaster actually did that and I think it's probably better than Pathfinder - certainly better than the direction that Pathfinder II is heading. I mean, in that specific case, being needlessly byzantine was supposedly part of the appeal. I should probably pick it up and check it out...

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 8:27 pm**

GâtFromKI wrote:For a human, jumping 15 feet is autosuccess, jumping 20 feet is DC 25, jumping 25 feet is DC 30, jumping 30 feet is impossible. So we can retro-engineer the expectation of the game: an appropriate challenge for a level 9 party is a 20-feet-chasm, while a 25-feet-chasm is an appropriate challenge at level 12. If one of the PC is an elf, he can even be confronted to the amazing 30-feet-chasm at level 15!

It always amazes me that people manage to continually screw up skill stuff that has direct analogs to real-world values; it really shouldn't be hard to set a baseline for what you want "average real-world human" represents and then adjust the numbers appropriately.

Like, sure, figuring out what a Bluff or Diplomacy DC means or should be is pretty frickin' hard because "talking to people" isn't quantifiable, but the world record long jump for a plain ol' real-world human is 8.95m or ~29.4, ft so a quick google should tell you that any setup in which jumping 30 feet is impossible for a human is nonsensical on first principles. And I, who knows next to nothing about gymnastic-athletic-sport...thingies...figured that out in literal seconds because I went "Huh, 20-some feet doesn't seem that far for a pro athlete, lemme google that." Come on, guys.

deaddmwalking wrote:On a long list of things that I think are crazy, 5-foot squares are up there.

Bearing in mind that the rest of the world uses meters, having '1 meter squares' makes a lot of sense. And Imperial units has a unit that is just a little smaller. 1 yard is equivalent to .91 meters, so making it so you had to count '1s' instead of '5s' seems like a no-brainer. A '5-foot step' becomes a '1 yard step' which also makes a lot of sense - moving 5 feet is a couple of steps for most people. And measure any door in your house - any. Even the front door that can open on both sides is probably less than 5 feet. If you could say '4 yards' and that mean '4 squares' (or hexes, or whatever) that'd be really easy and intuitive. Maps would make more sense; fights would make more sense.

If you keep speeds the same (30' becomes 10 yards/squares and 20' is probably 7 yards [21 feet]) you would have more movement, so that's about the only thing that could be a problem. If that's what you need to address, you just reduce speeds accordingly. If you like medium creatures moving six squares, you give them a speed of 6 yards (18'). You can set small creatures at 4 yards (12') and you maintain the same factor (.6). You could even potentially have creatures with 'in-between' speeds if you wanted. If you had a movement penalty that reduced someone from 6 yards to 5 yards, they'd still move in whole squares.

So yeah, if you're building a heartbreaker, use yards if you like Imperial Units. Your life will be easier.

I like yards/meters over squares as well, but another option for people who would prefer to avoid converting things is to go with the pace, specifically the Roman pace or double modern pace, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5m or 4.8 ft. So a 5-square room is now "5 paces across," which gives the same single-digit counting benefit without having to change map scales or speeds.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 9:04 pm**

Emerald wrote:And I, who knows next to nothing about gymnastic-athletic-sport...thingies...figured that out in literal seconds because I went "Huh, 20-some feet doesn't seem that far for a pro athlete, lemme google that."

But googling stuff is haaard. At least harder than pulling stuff out of our collective asses.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 9:49 pm**

Emerald wrote: I like yards/meters over squares as well, but another option for people who would prefer to avoid converting things is to go with the pace, specifically the Roman pace or double modern pace, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5m or 4.8 ft. So a 5-square room is now "5 paces across," which gives the same single-digit counting benefit without having to change map scales or speeds.

I don't think you need to worry about preserving scale. Maps all appear designed to look proportional without regard to what real world dimensions are.

Take This Map

Now this looks like a 'normal' D&D map, and I wouldn't think twice about using it to run a combat in. But if I bothered to think twice, I'd realize that there is a rectangular table 25' long with 3 chairs on each side. A simple search of dining tables that seat eight (3 on each long side, 1 on each short side) gives a general length of 8' x 3'. For every 2' of length, you can put one more person on the long side pretty easily. That 25' table should sit 11 on a side, easy. Just about every 'big bed' I see on a D&D map is 10' long (2 squares). The California King is only 84" (7').

If people made maps based on 'realistic dimensions', things would look too crowded for D&D scales. So they make things look right but then everything is 4x bigger than it has any right to be. Look at The Manticore's Tale. That room in the top corner is practically 30' by 20' (there's a cutout for the very large bathroom) - that's 575 square feet. Master Bedrooms in the 21st century United States are on average 300 square feet.

But I digress. It's one of those things that shouldn't bother me, but it really really does.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 10:08 pm**

Emerald wrote:
GâtFromKI wrote:For a human, jumping 15 feet is autosuccess, jumping 20 feet is DC 25, jumping 25 feet is DC 30, jumping 30 feet is impossible. So we can retro-engineer the expectation of the game: an appropriate challenge for a level 9 party is a 20-feet-chasm, while a 25-feet-chasm is an appropriate challenge at level 12. If one of the PC is an elf, he can even be confronted to the amazing 30-feet-chasm at level 15!

It always amazes me that people manage to continually screw up skill stuff that has direct analogs to real-world values; it really shouldn't be hard to set a baseline for what you want "average real-world human" represents and then adjust the numbers appropriately.

Like, sure, figuring out what a Bluff or Diplomacy DC means or should be is pretty frickin' hard because "talking to people" isn't quantifiable, but the world record long jump for a plain ol' real-world human is 8.95m or ~29.4, ft so a quick google should tell you that any setup in which jumping 30 feet is impossible for a human is nonsensical on first principles. And I, who knows next to nothing about gymnastic-athletic-sport...thingies...figured that out in literal seconds because I went "Huh, 20-some feet doesn't seem that far for a pro athlete, lemme google that." Come on, guys.

When they say "impossible" do they mean "actually cannot be done" or "one of the highest difficulties"? Because many games have "impossible" difficulties that are do-able. Both meanings are idiotic in this case, I'm just wondering which type of idiot they are.

Posted: **Thu Aug 09, 2018 10:55 pm**

Iduno wrote:When they say "impossible" do they mean "actually cannot be done" or "one of the highest difficulties"? Because many games have "impossible" difficulties that are do-able. Both meanings are idiotic in this case, I'm just wondering which type of idiot they are.

By "cannot be done", I mean "characters can't jump more than their speed (long jump rule p 147) and human speed is 25 feet". Because everyone has 3 actions but you can't be mid air between two actions and a long jump takes two action but derp derp derp I stopped caring.

Hence technically, a human can jump 30 feet if he's a barbarian or a monk, or if he has some speed-enhancing magic. Haste doesn't work since it increase the number of actions instead of the speed value derp derp who cares anymore ?

... And then, once you have the required magic, there's the DC 35 check. This is a "level 15 high difficulty task" according to page 337. At level 5, I don't think it's possible to pass the check. Real-world athletes are level 15 PC with speed-enhancing magic items.

... One of the few positive points of Path 2: there's a feat to perform wall jumps. Wall jumps are cool. Unfortunately, this can't be improved to a double jump. Anyway wall jumps are cooler than any jump option in Path 1 and D&D 3.

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 12:31 am**

The goal of Pathfinder has always been to be 'D&D, but better' or at least 'D&D, but more so', right? Whether they succeeded is another matter. PF2 looks like someone's been wanting to do D&D 4e better for the last decade or so and has finally got around to publishing their D&D 3.x/4e mashup.

I think the detail of long jumping is unimportant to that. More important is that they're trying to keep the game experience very much the same from low levels to high, except for making high level fights longer by inflating HP faster than damage as you go up levels. It doesn't look good for appealing to long-term PF players but it might pull some in from D&D 5e.

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 2:56 am**

Yo can someone in this thread fix their quotes?

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 9:11 am**

Iduno, please fix your tags

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 9:16 am**

The fastest way to gets tags fixed is to report the post that caused the issue and let the Fence Builder handle it, given the sporadic nature of a lot of posters here.

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 9:26 am**

Is that why he's Fence Builder, he fixes the fences?

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 11:29 am**

angelfromanotherpin wrote:The design goals of PF1 were: 'change everything just enough to make our game identity distinct and also make our claims of an overhaul fix plausible to those who don't look closely,' then the design goals of PF2 are probably very much the same. They're changing a whole bunch of things, but the only reason for any of the changes is to market themselves as new and improved. And maybe to be as obscurantist as possible, to make it harder to figure out that they aren't improved.

Then they are failing horribly at that, because people like me, who actually do like PF1E, mostly hate the new rules because on reading them they look like everything from PF1E was hit with three nerfhammers. Everything which was a fun option has gotten significantly worse.

Aside from the fixes PF1E did to 3.5 (debatable to most people here, I know), classes got actual upgrades and cool new stuff. Now I look at every single thing but "+level to everything" and feel like I am going to play "D&D, Toddler Edition".

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 1:36 pm**

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Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 7:20 pm**

I wonder if this new edition can lead to Pathfinder 1.5 branching off, because Paizo screwed up - I don't think people who genuinely like D&D 5e will like PF 2e, and as someone who accepts that PF 1e isn't perfect, but about as close to what I want from mainstream gaming systems, I'd say that PF 2e doesn't actually cater to 1e players, either.

Perhaps DSP or DDS, third party studios like Paizo were themselves back in 2008, could actually do something with that. They've got a good balance point in their publications, mostly - casters are brought to heel with Spheres of Power, and martials don't suck as much with Path of War.

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 7:34 pm**

Ignimortis wrote:I wonder if this new edition can lead to Pathfinder 1.5 branching off

It won't.

The release of 4th edition was a funny time. Wizards of the Coast wanted less competition, so they thought they'd release a D&D that didn't involve Open Content. They'd 'own' D&D again.

But to make that happen, they took away the magazine licenses from Paizo. They took away any reason this competitor would have wanted to work with them and basically assumed they'd just cease to exist.

Obviously Paizo needed to do something. They were a publishing company focused on fantasy RPGs in search of a reason to exist. Throwing in with 4th edition didn't make much sense - WotC didn't WANT 3rd parties cannibalizing sales and it would have looked bad. 3rd edition was still potentially viable. With WotC moving out of the market, there really was no other choice but to move in and fly the flag of 'real D&D'. And it worked.

This situation is different. There are no Paizo competitors that are being shut out by this change. Therefore, there is no reason for anyone to continue support for Pathfinder 1e unless Paizo chooses to do so.

Posted: **Fri Aug 10, 2018 7:40 pm**

deaddmwalking wrote:
Ignimortis wrote:I wonder if this new edition can lead to Pathfinder 1.5 branching off
It won't.

The release of 4th edition was a funny time. Wizards of the Coast wanted less competition, so they thought they'd release a D&D that didn't involve Open Content. They'd 'own' D&D again.

But to make that happen, they took away the magazine licenses from Paizo. They took away any reason this competitor would have wanted to work with them and basically assumed they'd just cease to exist.

Obviously Paizo needed to do something. They were a publishing company focused on fantasy RPGs in search of a reason to exist. Throwing in with 4th edition didn't make much sense - WotC didn't WANT 3rd parties cannibalizing sales and it would have looked bad. 3rd edition was still potentially viable. With WotC moving out of the market, there really was no other choice but to move in and fly the flag of 'real D&D'. And it worked.

This situation is different. There are no Paizo competitors that are being shut out by this change. Therefore, there is no reason for anyone to continue support for Pathfinder 1e unless Paizo chooses to do so.

That does make sense, yes, no actual financial reason to try and make another 3.5 clone but better. And enthusiasm doesn't really work for that.

Posted: **Sat Aug 11, 2018 2:21 am**

Say, given how PF was "dnd 3.75"... is PF 2 "dnd 3/4ths-assed"?

Posted: **Sat Aug 11, 2018 4:42 am**

One other difference though is that having seen something similar done once, there will certainly be those that try to make their own version of PF 1 (with house rules) and sell it. Some outfit named Purple Duck Games is putting out their Porphyra Roleplaying Game to try and take advantage of Paizo moving on, for example.

Posted: **Sat Aug 11, 2018 1:39 pm**

For some reason I had Fire Ray headspaced as a cantrip, which you can level up for free with a feat. Seemed like a thing Clerics could do, and instead, no, there's not much Clerics can do either, after casting Bless. Chill Touch is terrible. Ah well.

Conversation with Axelord.

Axebird wrote:There's no such thing as a -15 attack. Multiple attack penalty caps at two instances, which is -10 for most characters.

Multiple attack penalty -5 stacks every time you make a Strike action.
Quick gives you an extra Strike action.
So being quick gives you a -15 attack, if you use all four actions to make four Strikes.

Right? There's all sorts of ways you end up Quick, Fighter gets it for free at high level, but it's not an extra attack at full BAB because this is not 3e, but high level Fighters are having 4 attacks, and so are most others if they want them. Bard cantrip and all.

", while a two handed weapon ends up near 65 damage per hit (9d12+7)"
A +5 greatsword or greataxe deals 6d12 damage. A character with the Power Attack fighter class feat deals 8d12, which kinda sucks since it takes two actions.

PA is terrible, yeah, +5 fire/cold/acid on also maul//dorfaxe is doing 9d12. They all just add weapon dice each, I think that was the three of them, is there a 4th for 10d12? A 5th?

"and around 170 damage average"
I don't believe you.

Hit on a 3+ first attack (13+ crit), 8+ 2nd attack (18+ crit), miss gives you another shot at 8+, hit/crit 2nd moves it to hit on a 13+. Like, every +1 to hit just keeps multiplying your damage, a little slower, but another +5 to hit drags it up over 250, and against mooks where you effectively get that you can get even more damage by spreading it out.

"with a few reach extenders available"
Specifically "being a giant barbarian that turns into a giant and takes a to-hit and AC penalty" and "using a reach weapon that does less damage" and nothing else.

There's Enlarge (and thus wands etc) make you large, not sure where I saw the other one, but something gave effective reach, I think?

"and auto-trips or whatever"
The only things I can assume you mean by "auto-trips" are Monk Wolf Drag which is a 2 action attack that knocks the target prone on a hit, and Fighter Knockdown which does likewise. You still have to hit, which is absolutely not a foregone conclusion anymore.

Fighter, Maul, trip every crit. It's not auto then, because I misread one of the fighter things in that it tells me I get critical specialization with all weapons about three times at different levels, but yeah, every crit, which should be most rounds.

Or did I see something somewhere gets it on a regular hit? Spell maybe? Hmm.

"which 2-rounds every solo in the book with a few support hits coming in around 30-40 each."
I'm pretty sure you're just assuming all attacks hit forever at this point.

No. Average damage on 3 crits is 393, that's bigger than every monster in the game. I'm using a spreadsheet and comparing what I can find to stack with the high end solo AC numbers. They are quite hard to hit by default, but -4 AC penalty and +5 hit bonus are all low to mid level effects, and Fighters have the power to not take extra penalties on missing that 2nd attack that helps quite a bit once your 2nd Strike is near 50%.

Buffs and debuffs largely don't stack at all. None of the bonus or penalty types stack. A Sluggish 2, Flat-footed, Prone, Blind, Paralyzed, and Fatigued target is at -2 AC, period.

You count the biggest for each circumstance, conditional, and item bonus and penalty type, and all the untyped penalties.

Sluggish is the Conditional AC penalty (and Attacks/Dex/Ref), it's all over the place, up to Sluggish 3, add it to one of your Circumstantial ones. No idea if there's untyped AC penalties around, haven't spotted any. Good enough though, because it stacks with attack bonuses for the PCs.

There aren't any negative hitpoints anymore, and you can cheat death with one of your three hero points for the session to stabilize at 1 hp with no stacks of dying. It's really fucking hard to actually die now, it pretty much needs to be a TPK or nothing.

Oh, right, yes, hero points. That page was traumatic and I forgot them. Do I get an extra hero point for being sad about hero points, or is that only if the DM enjoys my sadness?

--

But in general, Pathfinder desperately needs a 2nd edition. The game is huge at this point and very hard to get into with choosing decent character builds and stuff, there's probably a hundred things you must not choose for every one you should if you want a competent character, and there's more monsters already than you can ever possibly hope to fight.

It also has quite a lot of problems, more than 3.5 in many ways.

New art (is promised), tweaked core system so most of the core character types are competitive, or at least have a reason to show up, that alone is worth the price of admission. It just has to not be terrible compared to the previous.

I'd give it a point or two in that I have wanted to build characters to see how they turned out. It's puzzling enough I want to try to understand it and compartmentalised enough that despite the size of it each character build path is simple, and they all seem like they have things to do, or most of them at least. Wastes a bit of page space with repeated class feats but not too bad.

But the number scale seems very bad. Just that huge damage the game ends up with, rolling giant stacks of d12s multiple times a round (can I get a 20d12+14 crit?) is probably not going to be fun, it's just a bad result of their design strategy, and as far as I can tell it's the optimal solution to the giant bloaty monsters.

Posted: **Sun Aug 12, 2018 7:18 am**

It says something that scaling the numbers downwards never seems to enter people's heads as a solution when designing games. Forget 4E being 'gamey', trending towards larger and larger numbers is what's making these things feel more gamey.

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