Pathfinder Is Still Bad

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Wed May 11, 2016 8:07 pm

Kaelik wrote:Magic of Incarnum is the only implementation of a good resource management mechanic that is under used even in most computer RPGs, much less in Table Top.

So even though it is a terrible implementation, and the actual abilities are total shit, and the fluff is garbage flavored garbage, people who are not capable of distinguishing these things have good feelings about all of Magic of Incarnum because of that.

Which resource mechanic are you referring to? MoI had like three all jumbled together into one as far as I remember.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed May 11, 2016 8:24 pm

spongeknight wrote:Which resource mechanic are you referring to? MoI had like three all jumbled together into one as far as I remember.

Magic of Incarnum has one actual resource mechanic. It's the one where you pull points around across your abilities. It's the one used in Koumei's Necromancer and my Blighter. It is the only one in the book.

(I mean, technically they have spells or whatever in the back, because always.)

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Wed May 11, 2016 10:21 pm

It's the one used in Koumei's Necromancer and my Blighter.

I don't think Koumei wrote a necromancer. Maybe I'm wrong, but I couldn't find one.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu May 12, 2016 1:08 am

...You Lost Me wrote:
It's the one used in Koumei's Necromancer and my Blighter.
I don't think Koumei wrote a necromancer. Maybe I'm wrong, but I couldn't find one.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55977&highlight=

Scroll down.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:01 am

Magic of Incarnum also has Chakra Binds and body slots and opened chakras and soulmelds per day. It juggles a lot of resource management systems for very little payoff.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu May 12, 2016 1:10 pm

spongeknight wrote: Which resource mechanic are you referring to? MoI had like three all jumbled together into one as far as I remember.

Are you mixing it up with Tome of Magic, which had Binders, Truenamers, and Shadowcasters?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Thu May 12, 2016 5:52 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Are you mixing it up with Tome of Magic, which had Binders, Truenamers, and Shadowcasters?

Nope, as mentioned, MoI was trying to fit at least two resource mechanics together. It would have worked better if they split the "X melds, Y binds, all in specific locations that unlock by level" thing a separate class from the "pool of points that you can re-allocate on a round to round basis" one, but I guess they wanted to test everything in one go.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:05 pm

Ice9 wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:Are you mixing it up with Tome of Magic, which had Binders, Truenamers, and Shadowcasters?
Nope, as mentioned, MoI was trying to fit at least two resource mechanics together. It would have worked better if they split the "X melds, Y binds, all in specific locations that unlock by level" thing a separate class from the "pool of points that you can re-allocate on a round to round basis" one, but I guess they wanted to test everything in one go.

This is basically nonsense. You might as well be arguing that Wizards were trying out three different resources systems, Limited number of slots, Limited Numbers of Spells known, and Better Slots as you level.

Melds are just the way you pick what you do that day from the list of all possible things your class could ever do. Binds are just the same thing, but they act as a level gate. 100% of totemists get a totem slot at level 2 that lets them do totem slot things. That's not a resource management system any more than "having a spellbook" is a different resource management system than having spell slots you put those spells in.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:18 pm

Kaelik, stop being retarded. Just stop it.

Let's talk Gorgon Mask. It requires you to be a 14th level Totemist to use properly, and it requires you to use the following:

- One of your limited soulmelds per day.
- One of your limited chakra binds per day.
- As many essentia points per day as you feel like setting on fire to get resistance to bullrush.
- Your throat slot, causing you to gain no benefit from magic necklaces.
- A once per day charge to actually use the murder gas.

That is one doohicky and it no shit interacts with FIVE different pools of limited resources that are limited to different numbers and in different contexts. The best that can be said of anyone claiming that there is only one resource management system in MoI is that they do not remember that shitty book very well.

-Username17

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:48 pm

You listed the Chakra bind twice, because you are being a disingenuous shitbag, and the chakra bind and soulmelds are the exact same things, except that one of them scales with level. You also picked the Gorgon Mask, knowing that 95% of soulmelds in the entire fucking book don't have a per day usage limit, and you can be a level 1-13 Totemist who uses it with no daily limit, and treated that like a standard case to imply that all of them have daily limits.

Obviously the Gorgon Mask shouldn't have a daily limit, but that's a criticism of the Gorgon Mask, and the three entire chakra binds in the entire book with daily limits. Three out of the more than 130 binds. I suppose that if I find a single spell in the entire game with essentia, that means all Wizards have essentia management as a resource management schedule built onto their class. Or what about spells that give Wizards benefits for being written in their spellbook.

In the meantime, a reasonable acknowledgement of how the system actually works is that you have X slots per day, and some of them are stronger than others (Binds) and you put on a bunch of blue glowing things at the beginning of the day, and that determines what you can allocate points into.

The only fucking difference at all between choosing at the beginning of the day, and choosing at level up is the difference between the Sorcerer and the Wizard, that you regularly decry as a false difference. But now, apparently you think that choosing daily is somehow a totally different "resource management system" than choosing at level up, or having the choice taken away by having it be class mandatory.

And that's fucking bullshit. Great, you hate MoI. Frankly, so do I, but I hate it because it's poorly written shit, not because they have you equip fucking abilities from a list instead of prechoosing all the abilities in advance and writing 38 classes.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:53 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Magic of Incarnum also has Chakra Binds and body slots and opened chakras and soulmelds per day. It juggles a lot of resource management systems for very little payoff.

-Username17

The chakra-binding system is pretty obviously built to put upper-level abilities on soulmelds without barring those soulmelds to lower-level characters. So if you want to be the Armadillo Cloak guy from level 1, you can do that, even if the ultimate ability is available at level 16. But you're right that it's dumb; it's more obvious and elegant to hardline those abilities to threshold essentia investments, which also have a maximum capped by level. So the Armadillo Cloak's ultimate ability should only be active when you have 6 essentia invested, which incidentally becomes possible at level 16.

The body slots thing... See, the thing is, a lot of people do seem to like body slots. Maybe this would be a different story of the Incarnum-as-magic-items angle wasn't hopelessly underdeveloped. As it stands, soulmelds don't displace magic items, there's no way to buy into soulmelds with strictly material resources, and they don't give you even the most tepid vow-of-poverty style suggestion for switching your WBL into purely incarnum-based swag. In that context, the body slot thing is so glaringly vestigial that I wonder if they didn't leave it in just to signal their greater (unmet) aspirations for the system.

Sidenote: An essentia-based Artificer would be pretty good. A little more contrived than the Necromancer, from a naturalistic perspective, but rewarding enough that I don't think you would care. Basically, you'd want a healthy suite of essentia infusions that employed your compatriots somewhat less as the base for force-multiplication and more as a set of delivery vectors, based on their positions and circumstances. So you have a Static Charge infusion which will shock anybody within 20 feet of the epicenter, and you can certainly deliver it yourself, but on this particular turn the Paladin is in a much better position so you make him your conduit. If he has a Stormshield (which you can make him) you can just dump the essentia and use your action for something else.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 7:03 pm

No I didn't list chakra binds twice. You have a limited number of chakra binds AND your specific choice of chakra binds debuffs you if you have the wrong magic items based on item slots. Those are in fact different things. One is a simple number of daily selections - like the soulmelds limit but smaller, and the other is a contingent drain effect. I didn't even get into the whole chakra opening minigame, because you normally only do that when levelling up. MoI is really fucking weird. Just admit it and shut the fuck up.

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri May 13, 2016 9:58 am

So it's basically ...

1: spells prepared (which have some bullshit small effect when so),
2: spells cast (some of which may be cast to different effects),
3: the items that go time out when you cast each spell (which are like spell levels, because spells often can be cast at multiple levels),
4: the mana points you invest in your prepared or cast spells to make them work better temporarily, or for various other things.

And there's 10 levels of spells and you can only cast one at each level all day, unless you can unbind them, I don't know.

So they're a Wizard who, prepares invisibility to get +5 to climb, casts it to get Invisibility while turning off his gloves, or Protection from Evil while turning off his amulet, or both or neither, and can shuffle around mana points on making the climb bonus bigger for a while if he wants to.

Except you/re a Meldshaper who prepares a Souldmeld for +5 to climb, and Binds it to their hand Chakra for ... and can shuffle their Essentia ....

Doesn't really support Charm Person or Fireball though does it, unless the person is only charmed while your cloak is switched off and your Fireball ... um. "The casting of charm person requires you give your cloak to the person to be charmed."

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri May 13, 2016 10:24 am

MoI Essentia system seems more suitable to being the overarching system you'd want everything else to fit under, rather than be a subsystem to a game with lots and lots of different subsystems.

Say a game where everyone gets X amount of chakra slots, with activating new slots after some levels and the abilities you can fit into those slots are

*Always on passive abilities like numerical bonuses ("+5 to my AC")
*At-will ability ("I can throw fireballs from my hands")
*Limited use ability that requires rest
*etc.

So a "hero warrior" type fills his chakra slots to hit hard and jump high, while you can be a vancian wizard if you fill your slots with limited use magic.

It's kinda like a point buy system.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri May 13, 2016 3:38 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/variant-m ... shic-magic

This...this isn't what I think it is, is it?

There were people who liked incarnum that much?

Veils do not interfere with magic items that occupy the same slot.

So am I missing something or does PF-MoI no longer block you from getting your necessary items?
I mean sure, the PF creative director will tell you, you don''t need stat boosting items, but everyone knows that is basically a lie.

pathfinder creative director wrote:You don't need cloaks of resistance to "live" though, unless your GM is particularly into a sort of "arms race" type of game.

The monsters in Pathfinder are designed such that the save DCs they inflict are, on average, not things you need to have cloaks of resistance to endure. They can certainly be OPTIMIZED so those save DCs get better, and that's what starts he arms race aspect of the game.

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Fri May 13, 2016 3:46 pm

Kaelik wrote:You listed the Chakra bind twice, because you are being a disingenuous shitbag, and the chakra bind and soulmelds are the exact same things, except that one of them scales with level. You also picked the Gorgon Mask, knowing that 95% of soulmelds in the entire fucking book don't have a per day usage limit, and you can be a level 1-13 Totemist who uses it with no daily limit, and treated that like a standard case to imply that all of them have daily limits.

Obviously the Gorgon Mask shouldn't have a daily limit, but that's a criticism of the Gorgon Mask, and the three entire chakra binds in the entire book with daily limits. Three out of the more than 130 binds. I suppose that if I find a single spell in the entire game with essentia, that means all Wizards have essentia management as a resource management schedule built onto their class. Or what about spells that give Wizards benefits for being written in their spellbook.

I think they did that because they balanced toward weaker than 3.5 Core casters. And generally, they worry about new ones overshadowing them.

What they should have done is 1 +1 use day/essential. This would keep it low uses, but still not at will.

If you aren't balanced to core (why would you) then make it 1 + 1 use per encounter/ 2 essential. Per encounter is 1 minute without combat then recharges.

I guess they figured Flesh to Stone was too strong to use frequently.

This competes with Basilisk mask which is at will, but duration 1 rd. Which should be changed to 1 rd + 1 rd/ essential anyway.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri May 13, 2016 4:30 pm

ishy wrote:So am I missing something or does PF-MoI no longer block you from getting your necessary items?

You aren't missing anything, the veils no longer lock you out of magic items for that slot. It's still not GREAT but that makes a difference.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sun May 15, 2016 2:41 pm

ishy wrote:I mean sure, the PF creative director will tell you, you don''t need stat boosting items, but everyone knows that is basically a lie.
pathfinder creative director wrote:You don't need cloaks of resistance to "live" though, unless your GM is particularly into a sort of "arms race" type of game.

The effect of not having a +2 cloak of resistance (say) is that, out of every 10 saving throws you have to make, you will fail one more than usual. A 10% increase in the amount of healing or resurrection you need is maybe annoying, but it certainly doesn't mean the difference between a playable PC and an unplayable PC. I mean, people play fighter PCs, for god's sake.

Sergarr · Post by **Sergarr** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:19 pm

hogarth wrote:
ishy wrote:I mean sure, the PF creative director will tell you, you don''t need stat boosting items, but everyone knows that is basically a lie.
pathfinder creative director wrote:You don't need cloaks of resistance to "live" though, unless your GM is particularly into a sort of "arms race" type of game.
The effect of not having a +2 cloak of resistance (say) is that, out of every 10 saving throws you have to make, you will fail one more than usual. A 10% increase in the amount of healing or resurrection you need is maybe annoying, but it certainly doesn't mean the difference between a playable PC and an unplayable PC. I mean, people play fighter PCs, for god's sake.

Uh, no. +2 to resistance rolls can mean vastly different things in different circumstances. Let's see three different typical situations here:

1) A resistance roll is kinda easy (5+ to save, 75/25). In this case, +2 to the roll means making a save on 3+, which is a 13% increase in chances to successfully resist.
2) A resistance roll is 50/50 (10+ to save). Here +2 turns it into saving on 8+, or 60/40, which is a 20% increase in chances to successfully save.
3) A resistance roll is kinda hard (15+ to save, or 25/75). +2 => saving on 13+, 35/65, which is an increase of 40%.

And that's not the worst case scenarios. If the DC of resistance roll you're making is out of RNG, +2 to resistance roll can literally mean either a +0% increase, or a +infinity% one.

In no case is it obvious that it all averages out at just +10% increase. And in fact, I'm almost certain that it doesn't.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:27 pm

Sergarr wrote: Uh, no. +2 to resistance rolls can mean vastly different things in different circumstances. Let's see three different typical situations here:

1) A resistance roll is kinda easy (5+ to save, 75/25). In this case, +2 to the roll means making a save on 3+, which is a 13% increase in chances to successfully resist. An increase from 75% to 85% is 10%
2) A resistance roll is 50/50 (10+ to save). Here +2 turns it into saving on 8+, or 60/40, which is a 20% increase in chances to successfully save. An increase of 50% to 60% is 10%
3) A resistance roll is kinda hard (15+ to save, or 25/75). +2 => saving on 13+, 35/65, which is an increase of 40%. An increase of 25% to 35% is 10%

And that's not the worst case scenarios. If the DC of resistance roll you're making is out of RNG, +2 to resistance roll can literally mean either a +0% increase, or a +infinity% one.

In no case is it obvious that it all averages out at just +10% increase. And in fact, I'm almost certain that it doesn't.

I just... I'm going to assume that you had a lot to drink or something, because there is no other explanation for how amazingly wrong this simple bit of math is. Correct answers in bold.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:29 pm

Sergarr wrote: And that's not the worst case scenarios. If the DC of resistance roll you're making is out of RNG, +2 to resistance roll can literally mean either a +0% increase, or a +infinity% one.

Because of the auto fail/auto succeed natural 1/20 rule, it can be as low as a +0% or as high as a +200% increase. You will always have at least a 5% chance of success. Whether or not you improve by 0%, 100%, or 200% has to do if you are right at the edge of the RNG, or two or more points past it.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:31 pm

An increase from 75% to 85% is 10 percentile points and a (85 - 75)/75 * 100% = 13.333...% proportional increase. Similarly, the rest of Sergarr's math is also right. Don't get smug and accuse people of being amazingly wrong on simple math when you're not even aware of the fact that "proportional change" is a meaningful concept.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:35 pm

John Magnum wrote:An increase from 75% to 85% is 10 percentile points and a (85 - 75)/75 * 100% = 13.333...% proportional increase. Similarly, the rest of Sergarr's math is also right. Don't get smug and accuse people of being amazingly wrong on simple math when you're not even aware of the fact that "proportional change" is a meaningful concept.

Except Hogarth, who Sergarr quoted, was obviously not talking about proportional change, and Sergarr attempted to correct him with math that had nothing to do with what Hogarth was talking about. Don't get smug and accuse people of being amazingly wrong when you don't bother to read the start of the conversation.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:38 pm

If hogarth wasn't talking about proportional change, I have no idea what he could have been talking about instead. What is "A 10% increase in the amount of healing or resurrection you need" if it isn't a proportional change?

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Mon May 16, 2016 4:47 pm

John Magnum wrote:If hogarth wasn't talking about proportional change, I have no idea what he could have been talking about instead. What is "A 10% increase in the amount of healing or resurrection you need" if it isn't a proportional change?

He was talking about the bit where, when you actually throw down the d20, you have an actual 10% increased chance to save against death effects no matter where your save started at and where it ended up at if you have a cloak of resistance or not (barring being off the RNG). If you started at a 5+ or a 15+, on actual throws of the dice you succeed 10% more of the time when you move to 7+ and 17+. Hence, you need to get rezzed 10% less of the time if you're succeeding against death effects 10% more of the time.