Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[Shrieking Banshee]

In theory, if done differently the whole proficiency bonus and such really could be a good way to go about this.
I mean the way they are doing it, their not, but what did anybody expect?

I'm seeing lots of inklings of good ideas undercut by faulty execution and not thinking things through enough. But I will say its a step up because good ideas where involves somewhere in the general vicinity.

[GâtFromKI]

In theory a unified Maths system seems alright (Target number should essentially always be directly level based as opposed to Saves, Skills, and Attacks all following their own scale ratio), of course, they are going at this completly backwards.

If having a +10 Attack bonus over the wizard didn't make the fighter feel like a legend in Pathfinder 1e, what makes them think that having a +5 attack bonus over the wizard will be so much more satisfactory?

There's another preview about proficiencies, I hadn't read it yesterday. Now I have.

So "being a legend" means "having a +3 bonus over the guy with a proficiency". So great. That's not even one standard deviation of the RNG; in other words, that's barely something you'll notice during game. And maybe the "legend" has some special actions. Or not. I guess he unlocks some bullshit feats, like "you can raise your shield when there's a dragon".

Hence, the "legendary" fighter doesn't even have a +5 bonus over the wizard. He has a +3 bonus. He would have a +5 bonus if the wizard was using a weapon without any proficiency - but in every edition of D&D, the wizard has always been proficient with some weapon. And with his spell effects.

P2 looks so... depressing...

[Shrieking Banshee]

Hence, the "legendary" fighter doesn't even have a +5 bonus over the wizard. He has a +3 bonus. He would have a +5 bonus if the wizard was using a weapon without any proficiency - but in every edition of D&D, the wizard has always been proficient with some weapon. And with his spell effects.

P2 looks so... depressing...

Again not the worst thing ever depending on how it's done....Its being done wrong so it is indeed one of the worst things ever.

[Thaluikhain]

Shrieking Banshee, you missed an end quote there.

Hey, you joined exactly 1 year before me.

[Shrieking Banshee]

Yeah, something like that.

Anyways now THIS is downright inexcusable. This is not Good idea but we fucked up alley. This is Paizo wants to make deathcamps for non-magical characters but cant legally avenue:

In addition to the 3 actions on your turn, you also get 1 reaction to use anytime before the start of your next turn. The fighter blog on Monday mentioned the reaction attack of opportunity, which allows you to take a free swing at foes that try to move around you or attempt to cast spells adjacent to you, but fighters are not the only class to have fun things to do with their reactions. The druid can gain a feat called Storm Retribution. If you are a druid of the storm order and a foe critically hits you, this feat allows you to unleash a powerful tempest on them in return, dealing 3d12 damage and possibly pushing them away. Wizards, meanwhile, can get the ability to counterspell with their reaction, canceling out enemy magic before it can even take effect.

The downright incompetence on display here is simply shocking for how many years of work?

So now Casters Provoke AoO from only fighters essentially which is a massive buff to CASTERS, not the fighter.
And STILL with fiddly worthless feats being thrown around like trash (Do some damage back and POSSIBLY push them away on a critical hit if your not dead)
And just like usual on the opposite end of Worthless fiddly garbage wizards simply can further flaunt their superiority to every other class as well.

[Mask_De_H]

Banshee, fix your tags again.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Again not the worst thing ever depending on how it's done....Its being done wrong so it is indeed one of the worst things ever.

As much as I hate D&D3 and its close cousins like Pathfinder, I would totally be on board if they actually managed to improve the game in some way. Unfortunately, all of their design decisions I've seen so far are just wrongheaded and pants-shittingly moronic.

Like, I see their reasoning behind these things, but the path getting there is like taking a hard left between A and B, and traveling all the way through Q to arrive at C.

Take the proficiency system, where being untrained gives you a -2 penalty (common fucking sense dictates this should just be 0) and having legendary proficiency grants you a whole +3, but with players also adding their level as a modifier to skill rolls. Now their reasoning is thus:

*They (nominally) want to maintain backward compatibility with PF1 where skill ranks go from like +3 to +23. But how do they do that without resorting to having players fiddle with skill ranks every level, and also allowing them to just copypaste skill benchmarks from 3E? I know! We'll make skill proficiency largely meaningless in regards to actually accomplishing tasks.

*But doesn't that mean someone untrained is nearly as good at diplomacy as someone with legendary chatty-kathy skills? I know! We'll just pull a -2 penalty to checks completely out of our asses to artificially create a 25% deficit. Because as we all know, it's the fiddly bonuses and penalties that really made 3E great.

Or take the action economy. They want to simplify it from standard/move/swift actions, which is obviously so brain-breakingly complicated that new players totally don't pick this up on their first goddamn session, so instead you just get 3 actions all of which have the exact same value, from swinging a sword to remembering not to leave your shield down.

Of course if they just give out 3 actions at 1st level, then sword guy is definitely going to use them to attack every round because we used to level gate extra attacks with BAB progression. I know! We'll impose a -5/-10 penalty to subsequent attacks! That'll learn 'em. But won't they try anyway? A penalty isn't a good deterrent to taking an action. A 5% chance to crit fumble vs. a 5% chance to hit? Any player would take those odds. I know! We'll extend the range of crit hits vs. fumbles to +/-10 from the target number. Also it wouldn't be Pathfinder if we didn't make attrition the worst possible tactic and then punish it further with iterative attack penalties.

And a -2 penalty to attacks of opportunity, when the whole in character reason they happen is because someone let their guard down? Because letterman Chad knows what he did.

So Paizo is stuck here between a rock and a hard place. They know it's probably time to update Pathfinder because everybody else is updating their games and it's the cool thing to do, but at the same time they don't actually want to design a game because that's for game companies and they're a marketing firm. So their solution is: let's contrive the numbers so they're roughly the same as PF1 and we don't have to do any actual math, but then we'll take some of the subsystems and run them through the wash on the stupid cycle so it looks like we actually did something.

[Slade]

I think it is technically possible to fix Pathfinder 2E easier than PF 1E, but that is just the optimistic side of me.

I mean, we have to see how bad they did Combat maneuvers. Maybe it is better?

[Zaranthan]

Maybe it is better?

If there's one thing the RPG industry has taught me, it can always be worse. There are systems out there that people pay actual money for that are worse than cops & robbers. There is no rock bottom.

[deaddmwalking]

I think it is technically possible to fix Pathfinder 2E easier than PF 1E, but that is just the optimistic side of me.

I mean, we have to see how bad they did Combat maneuvers. Maybe it is better?

Temporally speaking, sure. But remember, Pathfinder was supposed to be a fix of 3.x.

I haven't been following this closely, but this looks like change for the sake of change. Where have they outlined the problems that they're trying to address? How are they evaluating a proposed change against those problems. It looks like if they've identified problems, their 'solutions' just further compound the problem.

In past is prelude, they will ignore problems that they would prefer to ignore under the banner of 'backward compatibility', but that'll be a joke - no GM will allow Pathfinder 1 material in their Pathfinder 2 game, so what's the point? Secondly, there will be enough changes that even with it as a goal, porting a PF1 character/monster directly is going to result in 'holes' where you don't have clear abilities (for example, a monster with an attack routine of claw/claw/claw/claw/bite - how many 'actions' do they get in Pathfinder 2? If you port them in do they explode the action economy)? And if you bring this up as a question or criticism they can dismiss it by 'we will totally have updated monsters that won't have this problem'.

So yeah, a demonstrated ability to disregard criticism combined with a failure to articulate the problems they're trying to solve and/or a methodology that evaluates changes against the design goals ensure that Pathfinder 2 won't be better than Pathfinder 1 in any meaningful way, but it will be different, so maybe you should buy all the books again.

[djelai]

Pathfinder 2 won't be better than Pathfinder 1 in any meaningful way, but it will be different, so maybe you should buy all the books again.

Well, that's Paizo's goal, right? Sell more books to make money...
And it will work, because fanboys do not buy books because they're good, they buy them because they're new.

[Username17]

Pathfinder 2 won't be better than Pathfinder 1 in any meaningful way, but it will be different, so maybe you should buy all the books again.

Well, that's Paizo's goal, right? Sell more books to make money...
And it will work, because fanboys do not buy books because they're good, they buy them because they're new.

I'm actually not sure if it will work or not. Pathfinder was for a time the highest selling RPG because it was "compatible" with 3rd edition, and 3rd edition was more popular than 4th edition and D&D is still the top dog. I'm not sure whether "some random dude's SAGA / D&D hybrid system" is going to have much traction anywhere.

K and I went to Paizo and offered to do lots of mathhammering for them for free, because they were the heir apparent to 3rd edition after WotC decided to shoot themselves in the dick by walking away from that mantle themselves and we wanted the 3e D&D to be as good as possible. Paizo told us to fuck off, and in the ensuing years have gradually become less and less the heir apparent to anything. I could not tell you what any of the last five books that Paizo has put out are, and I genuinely just don't care. K and I aren't offering to do mathhammering for them at all, let alone for free. Even if they put out an open playtest call, we wouldn't write up reams of data for them. And that's not just being angry at them for burning us eight years ago. Paizo simply does not have the mandate of heaven anymore.

It seems to me that Paizo releases today have a much higher bar to getting people to buy and read them than Pathfinder books did at the beginning. And while new editions bring things towards any such bar, they do not clear it just for existing. Right now, Paizo needs to convince me that their new edition is worth reading, buying, or even talking about. And they haven't done that.

I'm sure it will sell some non-zero number of copies, but I don't see any reason to believe it will become the defacto standard RPG. It might even be one of those "only arguably even exists" RPGs like Onyx Path titles that are printed on demand for a few thousand copies. Probably better than that - but unless they come up with a better hook than they have so far I'm thinking closer to that than to 3rd edition or even 4th edition D&D.

-Username17

[maglag]

K and I went to Paizo and offered to do lots of mathhammering for them for free, because they were the heir apparent to 3rd edition after WotC decided to shoot themselves in the dick by walking away from that mantle themselves and we wanted the 3e D&D to be as good as possible. Paizo told us to fuck off

To be fair, Frank, you did point out to them the problems of Wish, Gate, negative level shenigans and shadows running into a chicken farm, and they solved all of those, so clearly they were just being tsundere.

[MGuy]

I don't think that they could handle pointing out any problems that they might want to solve because even when they end up (attempting) to address issues that are clearly a problem they don't really admit that they are at fault. At least, when I was quietly bumming around on their forums that's the impression I got. We're talking about a company that can't competently write feats for its own game after all. Still, fans 'will' buy it because a bunch of the community also seems incapable of seeing how bad the writers are. I think that they aren't going to see as much success though because their launching point was picking up the dropped 3e crowd, as Frank pointed out. There's no dropped community for them to piece together and only rabid fans still buy anything they put out.

If I were Paizo I really would have gone all out on the PF2 thing. Really put a lot of crazy ideas in the air while continuing to churn out dumpster material for PF1. They could have broken a bit away from the sacred cows of holding up D&D and really went balls out into pushing their own material, classes, ideas, whatever. I guess that they just don't have any really good ideas. Just pretty cool looking art.

[djelai]

I'm actually not sure if it will work or not. Pathfinder was for a time the highest selling RPG because it was "compatible" with 3rd edition, and 3rd edition was more popular than 4th edition and D&D is still the top dog. I'm not sure whether "some random dude's SAGA / D&D hybrid system" is going to have much traction anywhere.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. Ten years ago, PF1.0 attracted players who wanted to continue playing D&D3.5 instead of jumping into 4E. These players may not be interested in PF2.0... but they most likely stopped buying PF1.0 splatbooks years ago either. They may still play PF1.0 but they are not clients anymore and Paizo does not care about them.

The current PF clients, the ones who are still buying the shitty splatbooks, do not care about how good the system is. They are fans. As McGuy said, they probably buy the books just because they contain cool art.
And these fans will buy PF2.0, because they don't care about the system and they swallow marketing jokes like « each class can do something specific that the others can't do, such as raising its shield against an attack and that's sooo cool ».
It would make me sad if I didn't consider current PF fans to be a bunch of retarded morons...

[Wiseman]

How compatible is this looking to be with 3.x? PF 1.0 claimed backwards compatibility, and that was a lie, but at least stuff could imported with very minimal effort.

[Orca]

They seem to be breaking bits off the system and associating each bit with a class - only fighters can make AoOs, only rogues can catch people flat-footed - which I think will make it difficult to import monsters or other classes sensibly.

Also the monsters are supposed to be made by taking the numbers for a 5th level spellcaster (or whatever) and applying a template or two, and if it's like Paizo have done it in Starfinder then the monsters use quite different basic numbers to the PCs. Higher accuracy, worse DCs on their offensive abilities & lower AC than the PCs.

Not impossible but more work I think.

[Slade]

They seem to be breaking bits off the system and associating each bit with a class - only fighters can make AoOs, only rogues can catch people flat-footed - which I think will make it difficult to import monsters or other classes sensibly.

Also the monsters are supposed to be made by taking the numbers for a 5th level spellcaster (or whatever) and applying a template or two, and if it's like Paizo have done it in Starfinder then the monsters use quite different basic numbers to the PCs. Higher accuracy, worse DCs on their offensive abilities & lower AC than the PCs.

Not impossible but more work I think.

Technically, they said only Fighters can without a feat.
So AoO feat tax for non-fighters?

[Ice9]

Judging by Starfinder, it probably will be more balanced than PF1, but in a crappy way - non-casters will be similar to now but with lower numbers, casters will get the nerf-bat big time. They'll still be more powerful than non-casters, but neither one will have any ability to jump the rails or be able to succeed at things consistently without the DM handing it to them.

I can only partially put the blame on Paizo though. There are apparently a number of GMs out there who get seriously unhappy when a player can roll a "3" and still succeed on what they were doing, pretty much regardless of what that thing was. And they're catering to that audience.

[OgreBattle]

I enjoy the fiddliness of D&D3.X games because it's nearly 2 decades old and everyone is familiar. The fiddliness of Starfinder and PF2 though is discomforting.

Lighter games like Fate Core with more formal rules content or Star Wars Edge of the Empire would be a better Starfinder/PF2 than what they've got.

[Roog]

I'm curious to see whether they give AoO to almost all or to almost none of the melee focused monsters.

[Shrieking Banshee]

You know, a gradient success thing could be alright, but somehow Paizo found the most fiddly way to go about it possible.

[Iduno]

You know, a gradient success thing could be alright, but somehow Paizo found the most fiddly way to go about it possible.

I'm sure it could be fiddlier, but they'd have to risk putting in effort or letting players have interesting choices.

They made it as fiddly as possible while grabbing rules from whichever D&D book was 5 feet away.

[Shrieking Banshee]

You know I can forgive a lot of failure on the end of game designers if I feel like they are trying. But the way Paizo is doling out information they are CLEARLY not. Its just so transparently PR, not designed to inform but get people talking, when fundamentally the playtest is "Already locked in" as they said.

Its one thing to suck, but its another to suck and be a leach.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I'm just laughing that people were ever entertaining Pathfinder 2 being good.