Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[rasmuswagner]

I was looking up the potion table in PF yesterday, and I noticed that Enlarge Person is still 250gp. Nice to see that 3.0 holdover make it through two entire game revisions.

Weird. I never even noticed that. I've explicitly priced them at 50gp before just by going off of the formula. I never once considered checking the chart in the DMG.

What's that about?

In ye olden days, Enlarge was a +10% damage boost per CL, up to 50%.

[hogarth]

I was looking up the potion table in PF yesterday, and I noticed that Enlarge Person is still 250gp. Nice to see that 3.0 holdover make it through two entire game revisions.

Is this in the hard copy of the Core Rulebook? Note that the PRD doesn't even bother with a potion table, and I didn't think they had that in the physical book either.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/magi ... tions.html

Or are you looking at d20pfsrd's potion page? Note that it specifically says "The following table is taken from d20srd.org, the definitive 3.5 SRD resource (it was not created or provided by Paizo.)"

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/potions

[Voss]

What would be a more useful character.

So I want to make a platemail wearing spellcaster/ironman ish character.
my idea was:
Dwarf(maybe duegar) with the 2 ASF reducing feats (light and medium armor) and item creation feats.

My question was the class levels.
1 Cleric / X Wizard
or
3 Cleric/3 wizard/10 Mystic Theurge/X wizard.

Which is going to work better in the long run?

Not setting feats on fire, or, since you're getting the spellcaster degradation anyway, just being an oracle. At least that way you get full caster level, even if you have to deal with the Skip-hated-sorcerers-so-we-have-to-as-well hump at level 5.

[sake]

What would be a more useful character.

So I want to make a platemail wearing spellcaster/ironman ish character.
my idea was:
Dwarf(maybe duegar) with the 2 ASF reducing feats (light and medium armor) and item creation feats.

My question was the class levels.
1 Cleric / X Wizard
or
3 Cleric/3 wizard/10 Mystic Theurge/X wizard.

Which is going to work better in the long run?

Why not just be a summoner with that silly kamen rider wannabe class feature thing?

[hogarth]

So no comment on where you saw that potion table?

----

In other news, there's a preview of "story feats" from the upcoming book Ultimate Campaign:

Arisen (Story)
Escaping death strengthened your bond to life, but fills you with a need for answers.

Prerequisite: You must have been slain and brought back from the dead, or have the Left to Die or Cursed Birth background.

Benefit: You don’t die until your negative hit point total is equal to or greater than 4 + your Constitution score. Once per day as a standard action, you can force yourself to carry on by strength of will alone, gaining 1 temporary hit point per hit die. These temporary hit points last for 10 minutes.

Normal: You die when your negative hit point total is equal to or greater than your Constitution score.

Goal: You meet in person and hear the words of your deity or your deity’s chosen herald. If you worship a pantheon of deities, you must meet and hear a member of that pantheon—a herald does not suffice in this case. If you worship no specific deity, you must hear the words of an appropriate entity of the GM’s choice.

Completion Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus on saving throws against death effects and fear effects. In addition, the caster level of any conjuration (healing) spell that is cast on you increases by 1 for the purposes of its effects on you alone.

Lame. If you talk to your god and you happened to have burned a feat beforehand, you get a +2 to some saves. Boo.

[Juton]

While lame, at least they don't seem to be adding another resource to the game like traits or Ki points. The one upside of a book filled with lame power ups is that it won't induce power creep. Except this is pathfinder, so I expect to see a story feat for casters that makes martials cry themselves to sleep.

[hogarth]

While lame, at least they don't seem to be adding another resource to the game like traits or Ki points.

The "background" they mention in the feat description sounds like it's a package of traits (and maybe some other stuff?). That probably qualifies as a new resource.

[virgil]

Holy shiznit, they buffed Hags a tonne. Their powers in a covey (renamed into coven) got increased to at-will instead of thrice a day AND added the following to their already formidable list: baleful polymorph, blight, clairaudience/clarivoyance, charm monster, commune, reincarnate, speak with dead. It's not like they weren't scary before, but this just seems redonkulous, especially with all of the ways for PCs to start counting as hags for purposes of joining a coven.

[MisterDee]

Out of curiosity, what are the ways of forming a coven? I think the witch (or one of her archetype) gets it, but are there others?

More importantly, do you need an actual hag to form a coven, or can three regular dudes with the right ability do it?

[virgil]

The witch has a class option that lets them join a coven as well as a bloodline option for sorcerers. I think there's one for the magus too, but it's hard to give a damn about that class. All of abilities that let you do so, that I know of, require at least 1 real hag in the coven to function; but there are ways around that thanks to mind control and potentially other magic.

There's no word as to whether changelings (the half-hags) from the Advanced Race Guide make you count a full-on hag for coven purposes.

[Antariuk]

Well, at least it's a new way of superpower crazy and not just same ol' wizards again That actually sounds like a fun idea - destroying games, preferably Adventure Paths, by the entire party building a coven.

[icyshadowlord]

Say, anyone wanna gimme a quick recap of what 3.5e did right that Pathfinder is doing wrong?

I have a hard time finding specific posts, and one of my players apparently ate some propaganda from the Paizils again...

[RadiantPhoenix]

Well, there was this

[Voss]

Say, anyone wanna gimme a quick recap of what 3.5e did right that Pathfinder is doing wrong?

I wouldn't phrase it that way. There is a bunch of stuff that Pathfinder made worse, which includes:
all fighting classes.
The combat maneuver bullshit (trip, disarm, etc).
Wizards get more for being wizards.
Item creation is purely a matter of throwing gold into power.

and some problems more or less stay the same
nonstandard bonuses of varying durations (book-keeping ahoy)
lots and lots of random bullshit. Almost every subsystem has at least one minor change in it. People are still finding random shit that was changed for no reason that does very little.

The 'benefit' of pathfinder originally was not the backwards compatibility (that didn't work anyway because they changed too much), but it was a reason to toss out the dumpster diving books and simplify things again. But now there is the Paizo horde of supplements to dumpster dive through, so the real benefit is gone.

Mostly, though, the problem with Pathfinder is it is looking more and more like Rifts. Some classes are Glitterboys, and others are Vagabonds. Except there are only 20 classes rather than 100+, and less than half of them are viable. Though then you get into archetypes, which is essentially 'trade features that suck for features that don't suck.' But if the whole chassis sucks, fuck you and the dog you rode in on.

[Avoraciopoctules]

In my opinion, the real selling point for Pathfinder is how practically everything is legally available on one SRD site. Not having to bother with a dozen different PDFs or physical rulebooks makes MCing easier enough that I am willing to sacrifice a small amount of system quality.

[tussock]

Nerfing spells, while boosting the caster classes, even if you ignore how there's still good spells, all the classic spells kinda suck now. But the classic spells are what all the interesting monsters use to stop the Wizards automatically killing them.

Like, they changed Mirror Image so it works against Fighters but not Wizards.

Spells and effects that do not require an attack roll affect you normally and do not destroy any of your figments.

Yes, they did that. Targeted spells? All good.

But Vrock, for instance, their whole thing is they can use at-will Mirror Image and then have time to dance as you miss them a bit, and that just doesn't work at all any more against casters. Also, Pathfinder Vrock get mirror image 1/day instead, and are down to +13 to hit and have worse saves because they changed a bunch of shit for no reason. Like, it was good they took Giant's hit points down a bit, but that also lowered their will saves, while Wizards have better DCs. That's not really helping the Fighters.


But I think I've said all that before on this thread, so whatever.

[hogarth]

Say, anyone wanna gimme a quick recap of what 3.5e did right that Pathfinder is doing wrong?

Pathfinder took the 3.5E Player's Handbook, applied some random changes, and ended up with a Core Rulebook that's about as good the PHB: a few things are better, a few things are worse, and the rest is just change for the sake of change.

So what was their main sin? Well, in theory and with the benefit of hindsight they should have been able to come up with a game that was mostly improvements over 3.5, although it's complicated by the fact that their target market at the time was "people who mostly like 3.5E and don't want to play a game that's much different", so any radical changes were presumably off the table.

[Juton]

So what was their main sin? Well, in theory and with the benefit of hindsight they should have been able to come up with a game that was mostly improvements over 3.5, although it's complicated by the fact that their target market at the time was "people who mostly like 3.5E and don't want to play a game that's much different", so any radical changes were presumably off the table.

I think Pathfinder's greatest failings are not addressing things that only required more minor changes. There is a lot they could do to restrain upper level spells that most Pathfinder players wouldn't care about because most Pathfinder players never reach high levels. Since they where redoing monsters anyways they could have tweaked them so that martials or poorly optimized spellcasters don't need so much pity to survive. Plus a lot more.

Part of me thinks that Pathfinder wasn't a sincere attempt to 'fix' 3.5 but more an endeavor to rebrand 3.5. To that extent it has worked, why spend time creating high quality, balanced content when your fan base is demanding the same old tripe as before? Pathfinder is the Big Mac of RPGs.

[hogarth]

Pathfinder is the Big Mac of RPGs.

No, it's more like Burger King's version of the Big Mac: the "Big King" -- a knock-off of something that's popular but uninspired.

[RobbyPants]

In my opinion, the real selling point for Pathfinder is how practically everything is legally available on one SRD site. Not having to bother with a dozen different PDFs or physical rulebooks makes MCing easier enough that I am willing to sacrifice a small amount of system quality.

Which is funny as a "selling" point; you don't need to buy the books!

From what I can tell, the biggest selling point is it's close enough to 3E that a lot of 3E fans can still stomach it, and if you're looking for a 3E game near you, this might be all you find. They're still selling books and 4E is not. That's the selling point.

[Ice9]

The selling point, for me personally, is that it's close enough to 3E and they're making books for it, so it's easier to get new players for. Everything being in the pfsrd doesn't hurt. In terms of what it should be, it's terrible, but in absolute terms it's just a little worse than 3.5

Now as to how successful that is at getting me to buy books - partially. I buy the Bestiaries, because Paizo can draw some nice monsters, and it's something that's useful to have physically at the table (so is the main book, but enough other people have those). But it's not like I bought a massive quantity of 3E books either - I just don't have the shelf space.

[Rawbeard]

On the upside all the flashy shit they tacked on to the fighter stopped a lot of people from calling the monk overpowered. So there is that.

[Koumei]

Honestly, a lot of the stuff you can just port into your regular 3.X game, to the point that you could say "We're playing Pathfinder" and then actually play 3.X, just everyone has the fancy pretty PF classes. Until you run into some weird thing that makes it all explode. But basically, having a Bloodline Sorcerer or a Witch won't hurt your regular D&D game.

[Whipstitch]

Like, they changed Mirror Image so it works against Fighters but not Wizards.

Spells and effects that do not require an attack roll affect you normally and do not destroy any of your figments.

Yes, they did that. Targeted spells? All good.

This continues to make me sad, for the record. When I first encountered how many damn hitpoints you can get as a pathfinder wizard I immediately was struck with the desire to load up on defensive spells and Mirror Image just so I could stand around and waggle my dong at monsters as ostentatiously as possible for as long as possible. But now the figments mostly just up the number of visible dong instead of being the cherry on top of my OP sundae.

I guess the big takeaway here is that I am greedy.

[Whatever]

Wait, does that mean you can't use Magic Missile to pop all the Images like balloons anymore?