Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[Thaluikhain]

Wouldn't various Age of Sigmar book count?

Or possibly 40k stuff, only set primarily on a backwards planet to tone down the sci-fi and make it look fantasy.

[Whiysper]

thanks ISP - I'll look up Malazan Book of the Fallen. Never heard of it .

And yeah, Pug rarely acts high-level, which is why I tend to call him Milamber in these discussions - because a) that's his Greater Path name initially, and more importantly, b) that name sounds like a wizard. But his capabilities are definitely high-level .

[infected slut princess]

I don't know how many low level casters are throwing moons at people, but if they are out there I want to play in those games.

I was just being ironic. The name "Pug" always irked me but I can appreciate how he becomes hardcore and gets a cooler name later.

It's been 20+ years since I read Riftwar, and I don't remember the moon thing. Was that in the original trilogy?

Throwing moons at people is sweet. That's probably like 1000d6 damage. It was sweet in that Infinity War movie when Thanos used his super moon attack on Ironman.

thanks ISP - I'll look up Malazan Book of the Fallen. Never heard of it

Dude. It's the craziest fuckin fantasy series EVER. It's really epic. Insanely epic. RETARDEDLY EPIC. You will shit your pants from the epic factor.

[Seerow]

I don't know how many low level casters are throwing moons at people, but if they are out there I want to play in those games.

I was just being ironic. The name "Pug" always irked me but I can appreciate how he becomes hardcore and gets a cooler name later.

It's been 20+ years since I read Riftwar, and I don't remember the moon thing. Was that in the original trilogy?

No it was in one of the later books, I want to say it was the finale of the Darkwar Saga. There was an evil god trying to escape into their realm from another plane, Pug rifts a Moon into it, destroying the Tsurani home planet and stopping said evil god from crossing through.

I'm fuzzy on some of the details, because I never read the later books more than once, but that was a particular feat that stood out to me.

Throwing moons at people is sweet. That's probably like 1000d6 damage. It was sweet in that Infinity War movie when Thanos used his super moon attack on Ironman.

Wasn't the moon from that scene like a few hundred feet across?

[infected slut princess]

That Riftwar Milamber Ultimate Moon Attack sounds awesome.
I didn't read that far into the series.

Wasn't the moon from that scene like a few hundred feet across?

What's your point? It's a goddamn Disney marvel comic fantasy adventure movie. Lighten up man!

[hogarth]

I don't know how many low level casters are throwing moons at people, but if they are out there I want to play in those games.

To play devil's advocate: the difference between a 3rd level wizard casting Stone Call to kill a number of minions and an EPIC wizard casting EPIC Stone Call to kill an EPIC number of minions is less than you think.

[infected slut princess]

I guess that spell does 2d6 damage regardless of level. I guess the Epic Wizard and 3rd Level Wizard will be able to kill a handful of commoners reliably.

But a true EPIC Stone Call should do 1000d6 damage and should cover a radius at least a few miles across...

[souran]

It has been a very long time since I read anything in the riftwar cycle. However, as I recall it it still fits to the sort of tropes and styling that go along with high fantasy especially the mid 80's style where there are style a lot arthurian and tolkienist elements to them.

That said, the broad structure and actions of the riftwar novels are not particularly high level D&D. They are epic, but there is a lot of epic fantasy but the core issue is that high level D&D tends to not be epic at all. In fact, it tends to be remarkably anti-climatic.

Scrying, Teleportation, planar travel, summoning, mental domination, personal flight, illusions, pocket dimensions, and astral travel often show up in novels but any one of those tends to be a focus point of the story and usually have signifcant drawbacks because in stories magic tends to be dangerous.

The wheel of time is certainly epic. It even has the high end magic users do a number of very D&D like things. There are people who have others under long term mental domination. There are people who travel using teleportation, and people who travel using basically a method of planar traveling. They have access to divination through the Aelfinn and Eelfinn. They do eventually fly. They raise mountains using magic and do things that seem beyond the capability of D&D magic (aside from possibly wish) with things like cleansing the source and sealing away the dark one. While WOT is the definiation epic it is not really like High level D&D.

Honestly, one of the best examples of people doing a D&D like thing in literature I can think of is at the end of Scott Lynch's "Republic of Thieves." The wizard known as the "The Falconer" uses magic to scry on his mother, then uses his affinity with animals to enter the consciousness of a flock of birds (again through the scrying channel) and has them swarm and kill her before she can speak, because if she can get even a single word off she could easily prevent this assault from working. Scry -> Summon -> Stunlock before the opponent can act -> kill is much more like high level D&D than throwing moons at people.

The thing is that I think most people would rather have a game where high level is people throwing moons at each other than a game where high level is all about overwhelming first strikes and denial of action of the enemy. This is why pf2e and 5e look like they do. Because the end game that people envision is throwing moons at avatar's of long lost evil gods. Not trying to figure out which of 8 versions of a person is real and which are simulacra so that they can dump the real on into a plane of existence that is instantly fatal.

Edit 1:
Just so its clear, I don't think that 5e or pf2e succeed/will succeed at making high level play particularly better. I am just saying that the attempt to make it more like mid level play is why 5e and pf2e are making some of the decisions that they did/do. Additionally, I think that the designers of both games would have a better chance of implimenting a spell that throws a moon at somebody to do damage than they would at a sorting out how to make wish be able to do what it is described without it being filled with fuck you for casting this DM caveats.

[infected slut princess]

Interesting argument, souran.

[Username17]

The wheel of time is certainly epic. It even has the high end magic users do a number of very D&D like things. There are people who have others under long term mental domination. There are people who travel using teleportation, and people who travel using basically a method of planar traveling. They have access to divination through the Aelfinn and Eelfinn. They do eventually fly. They raise mountains using magic and do things that seem beyond the capability of D&D magic (aside from possibly wish) with things like cleansing the source and sealing away the dark one. While WOT is the definiation epic it is not really like High level D&D.

Disagree. WoT is not only "extremely like high level D&D," it's "almost certainly based on someone's actual high level D&D campaign." High notes include:

• Fighter and Rogue characters don't ever stop becoming more powerful, but basically stop mattering relative to the hijinx of the casters.
• Different casters have literal different spell lists and the girls are extemely obviously Clerics.
• If I describe major charactes by their D&D character class, you know exactly who I'm talking about. So for example: "The Rogue," "The Ranger," "The Fighter."
• The characters get access to powerful magics beyond what D&D 9th level spells get you. But they don't get them on their personal spell list. They get them by having artifacts that generate those epic effects.
• Scry and Die is literally a major tactic that resolves several major conflicts.
• Many of the magic items are literally taken directly from the pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide, such as the Horn.

Yes, Wheel of Time is a gonzo D&D campaign. But it is very obviously a D&D campaign. And the later books go into a very weird place where the author was going into Achilles Chasing the Tortoise territory where every book progressed the story less than the book before as he tried to spin it out for his entire life to keep making money. And he fucking died before he got to the end. But yes, Wheel of Time is very consciously based on characters starting as low level D&D characters who progress through the stages of being progressively higher level D&D characters. At least it does between book 2 (where the fact that the first book was self contained and complete gets retconned and it turns into a long running series) and Winter's Heart (where the author stopped advancing the story at all).

-Username17

[Wiseman]

What do you mean by "Stopped advancing the story"? I'm not that familiar with wheel of time.

[Grek]

The books kept getting longer and longer with less and less actual plot and more and more descriptions of people tugging braids and having inconsequential conversations with side characters.

[Whipstitch]

Jordan never bothered to tie up a loose end when he could instead write himself another B plot. It was to the point that people were semi-seriously predicting he'd die with the series unfinished even prior to the man being diagnosed with amyloidosis. To put things in perspective, there's 14 books and over 140 unique POV characters. A hundred and fucking forty! I bailed on the series at around two million words or so and that turned out to only be halfway through.

[Username17]

Each book spends more and more time poking around with inane bullshit and less and less time advancing the A-plot. There is a book called "Winter's Heart" where the main conceit is that the C-team of protagonists are traveling from one place they have already been to another place that they have already been in order to have a set piece battle that was promised two books earlier. I want to stress that the post script for the previous book is that the C-team protagonists in question traveled from point A to point B and the fight happened. But the book following the post script picks up not at the battle or after the battle, but during the journey flash forwarded through in the post script.

Anyway, Winter's Heart spends so much time fucking around with dialog and check-ins with increasingly irrelevant D-team characters that the entire 668 page book ends without the promised battle taking place, or indeed the C-Team protagonists actually getting to the place. So literally the entire book takes place between the start of the end credits and the post-credits stinger from the previous book.

That was officially when I noped the fuck out. I was definitely angry at how slow the plot had started moving before then, so when Winter's Heart came out I asked one of my friends who had committed to finishing the series whether they actually got there and the battle happened. And when the answer came back "No." I just flipped the table over.



-Username17

[Seerow]

Each book spends more and more time poking around with inane bullshit and less and less time advancing the A-plot. There is a book called "Winter's Heart" where the main conceit is that the C-team of protagonists are traveling from one place they have already been to another place that they have already been in order to have a set piece battle that was promised two books earlier. I want to stress that the post script for the previous book is that the C-team protagonists in question traveled from point A to point B and the fight happened. But the book following the post script picks up not at the battle or after the battle, but during the journey flash forwarded through in the post script.

Anyway, Winter's Heart spends so much time fucking around with dialog and check-ins with increasingly irrelevant D-team characters that the entire 668 page book ends without the promised battle taking place, or indeed the C-Team protagonists actually getting to the place. So literally the entire book takes place between the start of the end credits and the post-credits stinger from the previous book.

That was officially when I noped the fuck out. I was definitely angry at how slow the plot had started moving before then, so when Winter's Heart came out I asked one of my friends who had committed to finishing the series whether they actually got there and the battle happened. And when the answer came back "No." I just flipped the table over.



-Username17

Not going to say these complaints aren't warranted (they are), but Winter's Heart does actually end with one of the biggest plot developments of the series (The cleansing of Saidin). Perrin's storyline progresses exactly nowhere in the book, and that is awful, but there is things that actually happen.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Winter's Heart is then followed by Crossroads of Twilight, a book that is super dedicated to the concept of "nothing fucking happening".

[Thaluikhain]

So, like Anita Blake, but D&D instead of VTM?

[erik]

I think Crossroads is where I flipped the table and gave up caring.

One by one I started hating the main characters. Perrin. Elayne. Nynaeve. Min. Rand. Blah blah, and Mat was my final holdout until they started his romance line with the princess. I recall somewhere along that line I was in a Barnes and Nobles booktstore and wanted to check out the next book, started speed skimming through to find out how many pages it was until Rand showed up since they left his plot hanging on the last book. It was like 200 pages in before he showed up in that book. I foolishly thought there were main characters, and that's where I felt betrayed because they're weren't any because everyone's a main character!

[GâtFromKI]

Please, this thread isn't about bitching about RiftWar, it's about bitching about Pathfinder (and P2).


So there's a new preview about archetypes. I sincerely think it's the worse preview they've made - that's quite an accomplishment.

Archetypes are replaced with feat chains. Because some people though there weren't enough feat chains in pathfinder I guess? And archetypes aren't simple chains: an archetype is a feat chain that locks you in. You can't take a feat from another archetype until you've taken enough feat from your first archetype. I guess someone though "feat chains are a great tool to prevent customization and force people to follow a certain build, but we should find a way to prevent people to start two feat chains at the same time".

Of course, you may ignore archetypes. In the examples given in the preview, archetype feats have the effect of two feats. There's an archetype feat giving the equivalent of Toughness and Diehard at the same time - and the prereq feat give a master rank in fortitude and a special super-armor, I guess it's worth two feats as well. So while you may technically ignore archetypes, if you do you'll get only half the abilities of other characters.


Prestige classes are now archetypes - ie feat chains - , except they are accessible at level 6. There's only 1 PrC in the playtest document, and it's... The Gray Maiden. With the prereq "member of the Gray Maidens".


OK, let me explain.

First, the Gray maidens is a faction that exists only in one precise town of Golarion, and only during a very short amount of time (less than one year). So in most games the PCs can't possibly be a member of the gray maiden, because it's not the right place or not the right time.

Second, Gray Maidens are nothing more than evil mook. They are the stormtroopers of one of the APs, they have been indoctrinated by torture and magic so they can't defect the BBEG. When a new recruits resists the indoctrination, she's held prisoner and never becomes a "member of the Gray Maidens".

So the playtest document has only one PrC-equivalent, and the condition to enter this pseudo-PrC is "you are an indoctrinated Evil Mook who can't rebel against her Evil mistress - and your game takes place at a precise place and time". So it concerns a grand total of 0 PC across the world! That's a great job for a playtest: by ensuring no one may possibly satisfy the condition of the only PrC, Paizo is ensuring no one will test this whole PrC concept.


Finally, there's a feat named "sea legs". I wasn't sure about the meaning of "sea legs" in English, so i checked the definition : "a person's ability to keep their balance while walking on a moving ship and to not be ill". So it's something very useful when you're on a ship. The feat gives bonus when you're in water, ie when you're not on a ship. WTF, Paizo? How do you manage to be always wrong? Are you trolling Paizils, is this a social experiment to see how long fanboys will support you?

[erik]

OH shit. I actually thought I was in the where blah blah blah lost me thread. Pretend I said stuff about Paizo not knowing how to design original shit, and thinking that fiddly bullshit is the same thing as innovation.

[WiserOdin032402]

Oh god are we doing Boat Feats 3: Return of the boat? Now with boat archetypes? Why are boats such a big fucking deal? Why does it seem to be that boat is an acceptable specialization in any RPG without Water World levels of water?

And here we go with this fucking archetype and prestige class shit. I'm going to make a prediction, and it will be that Archetype and Prestige class feats will be considered, initially, too overpowered by the players and developers, and they will take steps to nerf them into oblivion until there's no point in making them.

[Ice9]

Taking a guess, if I had to sum up PF2 mechanical design in one sentence, it will be "Everything gets a mechanical widget, but don't expect those widgets to be in any way balanced or useful".

Being a pirate needs widgets, of course. Disliking ale, often wearing red, or being surly might need widgets too. But only a filthy munchkin cares whether those widgets are as good as other widgets, or are even worth writing down on a character sheet. The important thing is that they exist.


Re: Power level - I agree that's not by mistake, flat power curves are the new hotness. I've come to accept that unfortunately, a lot of players do seem to want the same basic experience for twenty goddamn levels, and that means that at 20th level you go for a drink in the Legendary tavern before a Legendary hooded stranger hires you to go kill some Legendary orcs who have stolen a Legendary shipment of corn and are guarding it in their Legendary abandoned farmhouse.

3.x didn't really support that, and the fact that it didn't confused and angered people. Heck, 4E gets called "overpowered" despite being overall very nerfed, because it's somewhat more blatant about "Yeah at high levels we do expect you not to just be a normal dude doing normal things."

And I don't even dislike games that operate at a much lower power level; I just think there are plenty of those already, much fewer of the 3.x style ones, and that you don't need twenty levels to go from "somewhat competent" to "very competent".

[Username17]

I know 3rd edition D&D happened, but going this deep down the rabbit hole of using the word "feat" to mean "selectable class feature" is very far from natural English, and people who aren't deeply steeped in 3rd edition D&D will be extremely confused by this nomenclature. In the real world, "feat" means "achievement" (like a "feat of engineering") or "accomplishment" (like "feat of strength"). But very importantly it doesn't mean "distinctive feature of a character."

Now normally I frown on "argument by dictionary," because it makes you sound like a highschool sophomore or the dumbest person on the Supreme Court. But I think it's important here because the actual plain English meaning of "Feat" is a different part of speech from the way these assholes are using the word. A feat is something you did not something you are. So "Pirate Dedication" is not a feat. Your dedication to piracy may be impressive and cause you to do impressive things, but the feats are whatever actions you take to prove your dedication to piracy, not the intrinsic quality of your dedication itself.


What's odd is that there are actually people working in this fucking industry who know what the fucking word means and use it appropriately.

Anyway. The vision they have for everyone having character advancement slots which they can fill from shit off their class list xor their archetype list xor their prestige list is the kind of thing that people who have been tinkering with 3rd edition were coming up with in 2001. Like, if I recall correctly that's basically how D20 Diablo 2 and D20 Everquest work. It's the kind of thing that people do when they get point system envy and start demanding fungible character design resources. But basically the reason that no one has been able to make that shit work in eighteen fucking actual years of bashing their heads on this particular game design wall, is because it's a dead end. It hasn't worked because it can't work.

• fungible ability slots that can be taken at 1st level or 7th level are either too powerful at 1st level or too weak at 7th level or both.
• branching chains is an inherently bottomless design space. Each level requires more content to extend the chains that could have been started at a previous level and also new chains to go into if you finished the previous ones. It's exponential and you can't fill 20 levels of it, because even 2^20 to measured in the fucking millions.
• the "make it a feat" design plan is always and forever unsatisfying because it makes stunts you want to do now into character design choices you had to make last month, which means that whenever you want to do anything it's always either over-determined because you already discussed taking the feat on your last level-up, or unfairly denied because the feat exists and you don't have it.

These problems are inherently inevitable with the design concept. Substitutable feat chains are bad. There were things that were worse than that and we had them in 2nd edition AD&D, but the real bottom line is that this is not what the future of game design looks like. People know this. And anyone who doesn't know this has no business making a new edition of D&D (or "I can't believe it's technically not D&D for trademark infringement reasons." for that matter).

This pirate bullshit feat chain hits all those high notes. It's bad in precisely all the ways it has to be bad, but it's also bad in ways that these sorts of things don't have to be bad. I mean, the entire concept of upgrading balance checks to critical success is stupid, because balance checks are passive. They shouldn't be doing anything on a critical success because not making them at all is what high skilled people should be doing. The entire concept of having characters spend multiple levels grinding away to get the ability to make a pirate mook entrance is intellectually insulting. And so on and so forth. Even if it wasn't an alleyway of impossible design, the people doing it have fucked this chicken to a degree I would have found embarassing before the second Iraq war.

-Username17

[GâtFromKI]

New preview! Magic items!

I guess potions don't exist anymore, but don't panic! There is still a consumable allowing a rogue to benefit from invisibility.

The consumable is level 9, this means it can't be craft before level 9. If I remember correctly the preview about crafting, crafting it requires a minimum of 4 days and costs at least half of its price. And this item is worth 85 gp. Its mere existence means there are level 9 people with the appropriate feat who spend 4 days to gain less than 50 gp.

This item can only be used by a master in Stealth. This means this item can't even be used before level 8 or 9 - and even then, only characters who are stealthy enough they shouldn't need invisibility can use it. It doesn't grant a full invisibility spell: it grants a 1-round-only invisibility. Level 2 invisibility of course. The trigger to use this item is "You attempt a Stealth check for initiative", this means the character is already hidden when he uses it - otherwise he wouldn't be allowed to roll Stealth for initiative.

So there's a consumable allowing a level 9 master in Stealth who's already hidden to become invisible for 1 round, but only if he starts a fight, and the invisibility breaks if he attacks.

It's amazing. I can't find a single way to make this item more silly and insulting. This is a level of incompetence you wouldn't find in a parody of bad game-design. I think I love Paizo as much as Tim Burton loves Ed Wood.


In the other hand, a level 3 caster may craft a 60 gp staff allowing him to cast some spells spontaneously. Go fuck yourself, martials!

[Axebird]

Potions are still a thing. They're even mentioned in the preview you're talking about. Plenty of things are stupid about PF2, you don't need to make shit up.