Pathfinder 2e

[Suzerain]

If Paizo's smart, they'll hire some prominent voice actor or someone with "nerd cred" to run flashy railroaded games with high production values and put it on Youtube. If they're really smart, they'll make a new channel for it so that people don't automatically associate it with corporate stoogery. If they're really really smart, they'll hire at least one person who is also sexy in front of the camera.
Fuck the game though, am I right?

There's a big, unavoidable problem with that. The game is too labyrinthine to actually be viable to watch, as there's lots of fiddly bullshit at every step. So in order to even make it watchable, you either need people who can play it so expertly that the insane spaghetti code that makes up the rules is imperceivable, or you have to actually genuinely deceive the audience.

The first option is right out, as anyone with both the dedication to untangle the wires and so lacking in other things to do that doing so is appealing is almost certainly not charismatic enough to be the host of a house party, never mind a web show. The second option is also unfeasible, as your potential players will find you out and call you out as soon as they look at any of the core rulebook.

[Dogbert]

There's a big, unavoidable problem with that. The game is too labyrinthine to actually be viable to watch

You say it like youtube shows were about faithful representation of a game at all. Just like the poster prior to you suggested, all you need is hiring professional entertainers with nerd cred, a writer to produce entertaining fake sessions, and you're set. It's not like even 10% of your target audience even plays games anyway, just give your script writer a hyper-simplified version of the rules to work with and your viewers will be none the wiser.

[Orca]

Reality falling short of the ads is an old story. People & companies have got away with it before, to put it mildly.

That's not saying this imagined youtube demo/show would be any kind of silver bullet though. It could hardly have the reach of Stranger Things, and it'd be easy to do it badly.

[Iduno]

That's not saying this imagined youtube demo/show would be any kind of silver bullet though. It could hardly have the reach of Stranger Things, and it'd be easy to do it badly.

If they were to do it right (they won't) a show that describes what people are imagining happening (like Stranger Things/The D&D cartoon) instead of interfacing with the rules at all would be the way to go. That way, they didn't mislead you; you're just holding imagining it wrong.

[WiserOdin032402]

Speaking of terrible ideas, we have the Advanced Player's Guide playtest. Featuring four new classes that nobody really cares about, like the Investigator, the Oracle, the Swashbuckler, and the Witch. I have no idea how they're going to be different from their PF1 counterparts but apparently the Investigator is going to come with a mystery-solving ruleset, the Oracle won't even have access to all its 'mysteries' (which the investigator cannot solve) in the playtest, the Swashbuckler will have uh...'new rules' specific for its class, and the Witch is, according to the playtest blurb, 'the most flexible spellcasting class we’ve introduced, since it allows you to build your own path by selecting not only feats, but also lessons from your patron.' so I can only expect that this one will be broken as hell.

If you can't tell I'm just reading their post and don't have a copy of the playtest yet. It was announced October 9th and ends December 2nd 2019, and the APG has a release date of July 2020. I'm just filled with confidence for this.

I don't remember ever playing any of these classes in PF1, only reading over them and vaguely thinking 'wow these are pretty shitty'.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Did you know that a not insubstantial portion of tabletop players do, in fact, like playing classes that are explicitly hot dogshit? It weirds me out when I see people homebrew really weak material, since I can't tell if they did it because they don't know how to play the game, or they want to eat shit and die... and they don't know how to play the game.

[WiserOdin032402]

Did you know that a not insubstantial portion of tabletop players do, in fact, like playing classes that are explicitly hot dogshit? It weirds me out when I see people homebrew really weak material, since I can't tell if they did it because they don't know how to play the game, or they want to eat shit and die... and they don't know how to play the game.

I mean I play Pathfinder Monk for shits and giggles but the class is hot garbage if you don't go Scorpion Style/Gorgon's Fist/Medusa's Wrath and take Mantis Style/Mantis Wisdom/Mantis Torment with it. Granted I see that as a tactics and optimization challenge (Making a weak class playable without simply using archery). I can't fathom why other people play explicitly shit classes.

[Iduno]

but apparently the Investigator is going to come with a mystery-solving ruleset, the Oracle won't even have access to all its 'mysteries' (which the investigator cannot solve) in the playtest, the Swashbuckler will have uh...'new rules' specific for its class, and the Witch is, according to the playtest blurb, 'the most flexible spellcasting class we’ve introduced, since it allows you to build your own path by selecting not only feats, but also lessons from your patron.' so I can only expect that this one will be broken as hell.

Yes! Invent new rules for extra classes that other classes can't interface with. I want to grab some popcorn and watch this trainwreck.

[Suzerain]

If you can't tell I'm just reading their post and don't have a copy of the playtest yet. It was announced October 9th and ends December 2nd 2019, and the APG has a release date of July 2020. I'm just filled with confidence for this.

A "playtest" for a TTRPG supplement that lasts only 54 days from announcement to the conclusion

You cannot make this shit up.

The oracle and witch are moderately popular among the PF fanbase, and the swashbuckler and investigator are largely thought of as aggressively mediocre, with the investigator only being really brought up to dunk on how shit CRB rogues are. However, the PF fanbase is not the same as whoever the fuck is actually buying and playing PF2, as they seem mostly to hate PF1 (or anything in the lineage of 3.0 really) with a passion.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the cults of PF2 are going to get out of the APG, given how bad the core RNG mechanic inherently makes the rest of the game. Other than that shit-eaters like eating shit, I suppose.

[jt]

Did you know that a not insubstantial portion of tabletop players do, in fact, like playing classes that are explicitly hot dogshit? It weirds me out when I see people homebrew really weak material, since I can't tell if they did it because they don't know how to play the game, or they want to eat shit and die... and they don't know how to play the game.

Every homebrew community I've seen (RPG, TCG, Minecraft, whatever) has a bunch of cheaty or overpowered stuff, especially at the start. The community reacts by developing memes and social mores against this behavior. People learn that they fit in by declaring things are overpowered. Then people soak too much of that up and decide that underpowered is good. It's socially safer to undershoot than to overshoot, especially if you have no idea what you're doing balance-wise.

I've also seen a lot of people declare that it's good that some classes are better than others, because the real world and/or fiction isn't balanced. Gandalf is better than the hobbits. But it's pretty clear this is a preemptive defense to cover for them having no concept of what balance is, because these same people never advocate having a mixed-level party.

[Orca]

The investigator looking into mysteries in its fluff is nothing to do with the oracle mechanic of mysteries. Just a coincidence of names.

Class balance is not a problem of PF2. They're all boringly mediocre.

Looking at these 4 classes; the investigator has a mechanic where it can do some things once per 10 minutes. New to PF2 but hardly something to get excited about. One of its 3 specialisations gets to automatically notice one hidden/non-obvious thing (chosen by the GM) when it enters an area, whichis the only interesting ability in the class as far as I can tell. In PF2 it has an off-brand sneak attack but no spellcasting.

The oracle is a cleric with stronger theming. Each mystery has its own curse, no mix'n'match as in PF1, so the possible variety goes down but that theming is even stronger.

The swashbuckler has to move around or at least use feints to use the abilities which let it fight effectively. Kudos for that, but it's a mess of abilities which require reactions (of which you get only 1 until 16th level) and apparently ineffective stuff aside from the basic +2AC & damage bonus for using an agile or finesse weapon.

A witch does get to customise their spell list slightly. So do some other PF2 spellcasters. Nothing much to see here.

[Suzerain]

Class balance is not a problem of PF2. They're all boringly mediocre.

And when everyone's super boringly mediocre... no-one will be.

The swashbuckler has to move around or at least use feints to use the abilities which let it fight effectively. Kudos for that, but it's a mess of abilities which require reactions (of which you get only 1 until 16th level) and apparently ineffective stuff aside from the basic +2AC & damage bonus for using an agile or finesse weapon.

They somehow managed to make the class named "swashbuckler" suffer from action congestion again?
In 1e it was well known for having too many options for swift actions, so you think they might fix that but... somehow even in a new framework they still make the same fuck-up. The +2AC will probably make it one of the tankiest classes without a shield though, given the busted maths of this edition.

[Orca]

The +2 AC is vs. one attack/round only so hardly tanky from that. Boringly mediocre, remember? They can use a shield though, with their light armor and presumably a dex-focus they probably are slightly harder to hit than average.

[Dogbert]

Did you know that a not insubstantial portion of tabletop players do, in fact, like playing classes that are explicitly hot dogshit?

While Paizo has indeed its share of people with Badass Dissonance, that demographic is outnumbered by the sycophants.

[Suzerain]

I really don't know what Paizo thinks they're doing. They must be stuck in some sort of feedback loop with their sycophants (having banned everyone else) to be unable to see the colossal, looming issues at the core of PF2. Maybe they got it into their head that it was their work on PF1 that got them fans, rather than simply 4e being pure dogshit and fans crying out for literally any continuation of the 3rd edition framework, I don't know. But by any metrics I can find, they're getting stomped in sales and awareness by 5e, which is the Corman Fantastic 4 "we just need to hold on to this license by producing literally anything" edition. And it's also been out for, what, five-ish years now? So it's hardly in its new edition boom or anything.

The question is, where to from here? Expansion material from Paizo can't un-fuck the RNG and the boring abilities because those two things are somehow core conceits of the system. Same reason no amount of 3rd party content could save it because anything that is actually interesting will automatically be better than everything in the whole game. If someone has any idea of the sort of thing that could make this game worth playing, please enlighten me.

[Orca]

They don't need to ban their critics these days. The true believers will shout them down. 'Follow the leader' is a natural tendency which you see less of on the Den than paizo.com - there's more contrary people here - but which still is visible sometimes. Paizo's happy to encourage that tendency rather than being wary of it, so the necessary (IMO) ground-up rewrite of PF2 isn't obvious to them, and probably won't ever happen.

[Libertad]

They don't need to ban their critics these days. The true believers will shout them down. 'Follow the leader' is a natural tendency which you see less of on the Den than paizo.com - there's more contrary people here - but which still is visible sometimes. Paizo's happy to encourage that tendency rather than being wary of it, so the necessary (IMO) ground-up rewrite of PF2 isn't obvious to them, and probably won't ever happen.

There's also the fact that the sizable percentage of PF1 fans have already made the decision to stick with the older books even before seeing the playtest.

[WiserOdin032402]

As I see it, PF2 is a functional but boring wargame about controlling individual minis on a board and doing little skirmisher tactics. The fucked RNG doesn't really matter because the monsters got fixed or the monsters in the newer modules are the not-fucked monsters. It's just that everything's boring as sin and there's no way they're gonna change that because it's built into the system. The players never really get entertainingly powerful and don't really go on 'high level adventures'. They just fight bigger monsters, climb bigger cliffs, swing bigger swords, and eat less food or whatever.

You never get off the RNG because you have to be constantly rolling dice. If the GM is calling for a roll, it has to be a relevant one. Irrelevant challenges are automatic successes and get crushed so hard it's not even funny thanks to the 10 over/10 under rule. If you can constantly hit with your third attack, whatever you're fighting is dead. If they can't make the save, whatever your fireballing is basically dead. Save or Dies now can't kill level appropriate things (or if they can it's like a 1 in 6 chance and if they succeed they're immune for 24 hours) but they can utterly shred lower level opposition. Classes get a feat at every level and can be fully customized how you want and encourage specialization in one or two things. Theoretically speaking this is all a vast improvement over 3.X game balance wise, but it doesn't matter because it's boring. All the balance for the combat minigame and the skill check system doesn't fucking matter if I'm making a minimum of two to six choices a level that only incrementally effect how I play. Your options are piddly debuff, piddly but very important buff, or do damage. And sure a +1 longsword does 2d8+x damage and a flaming longsword does even more dice, but all that does is slap a (fairly decent, in my opinion) band-aid on 3.X's HP bloat, and it's not even coming on in the earlier levels where it matters more.

Credit where credit is due, however. They solved the 'Level 1 is suckass rocket tag' problem about as well as they could. It still sucks but now you start with 20-something HP at level 1 rather than 8 to 14, and they also managed to nerf longbows back into not being 'The obvious choice at all times' by giving them a minimum effective range and halving the strength benefit to damage.

That last one is probably a stealth nerf to fighting classes at higher levels though.

[Dogbert]

there's more contrary people here

Oh no, we all agree that your favorite game is shit, regardless of which game or which person we're talking about.

[Username17]

The biggest problem with PF2 is that even now it doesn't make enough of a case for itself to even evaluate whether it has problems.

Like, moving all of the action types into one action type and letting people take three from the big list gives people a lot more options. To a first approximation, it's about twenty seven times as many options. And yet, while there are a few new configurations that will really see use (like Move-Shoot-Move), to a first approximation most of the new options are either going to go unused or simply supplant otherwise less optimal configurations. It's blatantly obvious that the number of increased "real" options isn't more than twenty times as many as dividing things into Column A, Column B, and Column C.

So there's obviously an option paralysis cost to dumping all the actions into a big unordered list. But I can't make a complete argument against the move because the PF2 authors haven't made an argument for the move. I don't know what this is supposed to accomplish or why we're supposed to want to do things this way.

PF2 is like a bundle of ideas you might find in a 1980s style DM's three ring binder. It doesn't look like a design in any meaningful sense of the term. It's all far enough from 3e that it can't be evaluated as a 3e hack, but also too its own context isn't well defined. It's a fiddly heartbreaker fueled by the ease of vomiting ideas onto a page by the thousands when you have a word processor, but there doesn't seem to be any vision. None of the choices seem justified by anything. There aren't even wrong arguments in its favor, it's basically Scion.

-Username17

[Mord]

Theoretically speaking this is all a vast improvement over 3.X game balance wise, but it doesn't matter because it's boring. All the balance for the combat minigame and the skill check system doesn't fucking matter if I'm making a minimum of two to six choices a level that only incrementally effect how I play. Your options are piddly debuff, piddly but very important buff, or do damage. And sure a +1 longsword does 2d8+x damage and a flaming longsword does even more dice, but all that does is slap a (fairly decent, in my opinion) band-aid on 3.X's HP bloat, and it's not even coming on in the earlier levels where it matters more.

The more I read various heartbreakers and OSSRs and discussions on the Den and elsewhere, the more convinced I am that "fixing" 3e is pointless. If you lean in too hard on the tactical wargame, you get boring crap like 4e or PF2, where notwithstanding the competence of the execution, the goals could only ever result in an experience better suited to a board game. If you try to go too far towards balancing to the "gonzo crazy shit wizards can do with agency" direction and altering the design to facilitate that level of player control over the narrative, you go rules lite or full improv theater.

What even is the point of 3.X, if the only interesting thing to do with it is exploit its flaws to subvert its expectations?

[Suzerain]

What even is the point of 3.X, if the only interesting thing to do with it is exploit its flaws to subvert its expectations?

Playing a homebrewed version of it is still the best D&D experience you can get, almost two decades on. And until there's an industry-wide paradigm shift of the audience at large giving a shit about anything other than brand recognition, that's where we'll be for the forseeable future. Even though 5th edition is obviously a Potemkin village put up to justify Mike Mearls and his buddies still being employed by Hasbro, it's the market leader because it has the name D&D on it and there's no other real competition.

[Foxwarrior]

If you try to go too far towards balancing to the "gonzo crazy shit wizards can do with agency" direction and altering the design to facilitate that level of player control over the narrative, you go rules lite or full improv theater.

I'm pretty sure this is a non sequitur. Being able to explicitly quantify how quickly you can shuttle people with plane shift increases player control. Rules lite games oddly enough tend to make the characters pretty weak even when the players playing them get more narrative control; the trouble with trying to increase narrative control by going rules heavy is not that it doesn't work (it does), it's that it gets too far into Logistics and Dragons sometimes.

[Stubbazubba]

Playing a homebrewed version of it is still the best D&D experience you can get, almost two decades on. And until there's an industry-wide paradigm shift of the audience at large giving a shit about anything other than brand recognition, that's where we'll be for the forseeable future. Even though 5th edition is obviously a Potemkin village put up to justify Mike Mearls and his buddies still being employed by Hasbro, it's the market leader because it has the name D&D on it and there's no other real competition.

The 3e play experience only rests atop a fairly significant learning curve. 5e has a much smaller learning curve. Of course, that is accomplished in part by having no rules for pretty important things, but a key distinction between 5e and 3e is that people can learn to play basic 5e quickly. It's the market leader because it has the name D&D on it, there's no other real competition, and it's more accessible than anything that might compete with it, like PF2.

[pragma]

If you lean in too hard on the tactical wargame, you get boring crap like 4e or PF2, where notwithstanding the competence of the execution, the goals could only ever result in an experience better suited to a board game. If you try to go too far towards balancing to the "gonzo crazy shit wizards can do with agency" direction and altering the design to facilitate that level of player control over the narrative, you go rules lite or full improv theater.

I've been wrestling with this idea too: why TTRPGs at all? I think the things that make them unique are (1) face-to-face (or at least Skype-to-Skype) social time (2) open-ended conversation/interaction with NPCs and (3) the ability to splice rules together to fairly evaluate what happens when players skip the rails. That's a pretty nihilistic list though: if the reason to play RPGs is to hang out with your friends and make shit up, then why not always Munchhausen?

I've squared that circle by convincing myself that tactical combat minigames are very elaborate improv prompts. They force players to invest in some specific guy that they conceive of because they decided to have a bow and sneaking skills. That's true of mechanics at every level. If chain binding exists in your game and high level wizard players can figure out how to do it, then that's just a prompt for them to portray high level wizard characters who are OK with having harems of demons.

In light of that, I find rules lite games, though they often consider genre conventions in a more thoughtful way than D&D (i.e.: at all), actually make WORSE prompts. If I know I'm being told to run a method acting class with a few rules for procedural generation, then I become aware of how bad I am at it. However, the artifice of squares and spell effects distracts me from the fact that what I'm really after is bad improv and subpar board game rules.