Pathfinder 2e

[OgreBattle]

Has any 4th party decided to continue supporting the previous edition of PF?

[Username17]

Has any 4th party decided to continue supporting the previous edition of PF?

-Username17

[Orca]

There's a few 3rd party publishers who'll still be producing content for PF1 (at least one is doing stuff with stats for multiple systems including PF1), and Purple Duck games are supporting their own version for now.

[Koumei]

Wait, so a 4th party is making their own Pathfinder of Pathfinder? Will that have a 5th party making content for it, perhaps going on to make their own offshoot version eventually?

[maglag]

Wait, so a 4th party is making their own Pathfinder of Pathfinder? Will that have a 5th party making content for it, perhaps going on to make their own offshoot version eventually?

The 5th party making content for it has already been going for years now.

Purple Duck games launched their own 3e/PF clone in 2012 actually (before PF2 was announced) and seems like they had some success so other companies released material for it too over the last 8 years.

It's entirely possible that one of those companies already made their own offshoot since then, but I can't be bothered to look that deep.

[saithorthepyro]

I've been consistently happy with Purple Duck's materials but I like 1e Pathfinder so take that with a grain of salt.

As for PF 2e, I have no idea what's going on with it because the only place regularly discussing it is their own forums, which are about as useful at they have ever been

[merc1138]

Ok, Paizo has actually confused me now. I understand if you're pushing a new product(pf2e) that no matter how poorly it's doing that's what you want to be promoting. But apparently they had the rise of the runelords pf1e pocket edition on sale for preorder and it went on sale today.

Huh?

It's not backpedaling on 2e, it's not really continuing to support 1e. Who is the market for that? Just get a PDF and put it on your phone, instant pocket edition. Even in the comments on their own page about it someone said something about keeping memories of their rotr campaign at hand.. carrying around a paperback AP is going to do that? I'm legitimately confused by this. Even with nostalgia, get a new hardback and keep it pristine.
https://paizo.com/products/btq01zr9?Pat ... et-Edition
And it's mentioned as a blurb at the end of their blog post from the other week as "coming soon"
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748d ... lu-Be-Food

[Kevin Mack]

Also to continue Paizo's trying diversity and making it worse it seems there not happy with the name Skinwalker (I'll admit I'm not clear with the why I assume something to do with native american tradition). So instead for Pf2e anything that was a skinwalker will now have always just been a werecreature.

So an offensive name is wrong but whitewashing an entire race out of existence isent what the actual hell?

[Kaelik]

Uh? Skinwalkers arent a real "race" of actual people? So yes whitewashing them out of existence is fine.

Maybe I am missing something because I dont know pathfinder but this sounds like they are removing a monster race that at best represented a mythical creature of some real world peoples in a general sense and replacing it with something that does mechanically the same stuff but without that name.

I cant specifically say whether any of this is good or not but it doesn't seem like any actual human beings are erased.

[Kevin Mack]

Meh maybe I'm just getting annoyed since James Jacobs has a history of completly re-writing history in regards to what he says and does (See Erastil and goblins)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Maybe I am missing something because I dont know pathfinder but this sounds like they are removing a monster race that at best represented a mythical creature of some real world peoples in a general sense and replacing it with something that does mechanically the same stuff but without that name.

I cant specifically say whether any of this is good or not but it doesn't seem like any actual human beings are erased.

Now you've got me curious. At what point do you go from using the 'general' mythological conception of a creature, like a zombie, to a culture-specific conception, like a jiangshi? Yes I know the actual zombie term originated in Haiti but you know what the fuck I mean

[saithorthepyro]

I don't think it's anything to get really upset about. Skinwalker is an actual mythological creature, you can definitely make an argument that it's been culturally appropriated from native american tribes (Navajo specifically) as a monster of the week style creature for all kinds of media, so Paizo changing the name to something else is...okay? I'm more angry over the overall rules direction in 2nd edition than that.

TAA, in my uneducated opinion a lot of it had to do with A). What culture the creature is appropriated from, and B). How much of that culture the creature reflects.

[Username17]

My opinion is that fear of cultural appropriation is in almost all instances balanced by fear of cultural erasure. There's definitely ways you can shit on first nations people (like so many ways), but pretending that you weren't inspired by Navajo mythology when making a monster doesn't seem obviously superior to admitting that you were inspired by Navajo mythology when making a monster. Very much the opposite.

Of course, it's Pathfinder 2, I don't really care what they call their monsters.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Can't speak for this example, but apparently there's a thing were you call your weremonsters "skinwalkers" to sound all exotic, despite skinwalkers in actual Native American tradition not really being at all like the way most people depict weremonsters. Same with Wendigos.

[saithorthepyro]

Pretty much. Pathfinder Skinwalkers are half-lycanthropes who get a racial ability to change to a more bestial state. There's nothing really related to Navajo mythology in their Pathfinder depiction.

[Username17]

Can't speak for this example, but apparently there's a thing were you call your weremonsters "skinwalkers" to sound all exotic, despite skinwalkers in actual Native American tradition not really being at all like the way most people depict weremonsters. Same with Wendigos.

Weremonsters in European folklore are mostly not very much like modern Werewolf depictions either. I mean, "Dogs of God," male mutual masturbation societies, bear sark raiders, and so on. If you made a D&D monster out of a skinwalker it's going to take more from Dungeons & Dragons and modern American fantasy than from Navajo beliefs about shamanism, but then Werewolves in D&D take more from modern fantasy and other D&D tropes than it does from any identifiable European superstitions.

I don't think it's reasonable or good to edit out all references to Navajo mythology when you aren't editing out references to Greek mythology.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The reasons why cultural appropriation is bad aren't very hard to explain, but for some reason they are far less common knowledge than the understanding that cultural appropriation is, for some mysterious and ineffable reason, wrong.

So here's the thing: When someone knows how your culture works, it creates a shared pool of reference that makes you seem scrutable and familiar, and they're much less likely to have a xenophobic reaction to you. When someone has no idea how your culture works, you have less in common and tend to feel alienated from one another, which is pretty frightening when their culture has incredible power and yours does not. This is one of those small things that can add up to shockingly big results given breadth and time, so things which make it harder for already-marginalized cultures to spread their culture is generally bad, especially when these things are being done by the dominant culture. In its extreme form, you get things like kidnapping children into Christian schools where the annihilation of the marginalized culture is the actual stated goal.

But also there's things like taking on a culture's names, clothes, etc. etc. and using them in media that has no understanding of the underlying stories and customs that inform those names/clothes/whatever, which does not build a shared reference pool. The dominant culture becomes familiar with names and appearances but has no understanding of the stories or practices that underlie them. The marginalized culture becomes less able to spread their memes in the dominant one, because there's now a directly competing meme using the same name/clothes/whatever while referring to something else.

Like, imagine if you got abducted by aliens and wound up on a planet where an alien culture was culturally and economically dominant, but they'd picked up some Star Wars transmissions and some alien pop star had made a hit single about those wacky humans and their hero Luke Skywalker, which was on all the space radios for six weeks back in 2015, but contained no real references to who Luke was or what he did. For them, Luke Skywalker is a reference not to the story of Star Wars, but to a song about how humans are weird/scary/sexy/all three. They won't understand your references, they won't grok your culture, and they won't feel like they understand you or have something in common with you. All the song has done is thrown up further barriers to finding common ground, because before you can explain to them the place Luke Skywalker has in your culture, you first have to explain to them that the song isn't an accurate portrayal. On top of the general difficulty of trying to create referential common ground with a culture much more powerful than you and which thus has very little incentive to care, you also have to compete directly against a meme that's taken many of the most compelling surface-level hooks and appended them to a totally unrelated meme.

So, skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are an evil witch from Navajo lore who have the ability to either transform or bodyhop into an animal form. If they're bodyhoppers, sometimes they can bodyhop into humans, too. They're mythical antagonists from Navajo culture, not a specific position in Navajo society or anything, so certainly no one is being directly erased. Their transformation is a spell that they learn and abuse, not an affliction they can spread through transmission or bloodline (except in that a skinwalker might plausibly teach their evil powers to their children). You could imagine a supernatural ability or template for them that captured their abilities and place in Navajo culture reasonably well, especially if it was in a book that was about fantasy versions of the First Nations in general or the Navajo in particular (barring an additional wrinkle that I'll get to in a bit).

Paizo did not do this. Paizo made "skinwalker" a race of people descended from lycanthropes who exist purely to make a lycanthrope you can play from level 1. That's not a bad goal to have, although you still probably want it to be a class so you can turn into a CR1 wolf at level 1 and then get a proper war form at level 2 or 3. More importantly, you definitely don't want to slap the barely-related name "skinwalker" on there, especially not when you're going to give all the sub-races (i.e. your wererat, wereboar, werewolf, etc.) dumb Pathfinder names like "ragebred" and "witchwolf" and "bloodmarked."

For Navajo myths in particular, there's an additional wrinkle, which is that the current online Navajo zeitgeist is really committed to cultural suicide by refusing to spread their culture to outsiders (apparently there are some exceptions for trusted confidants, but only because they're trusted not to spread it any further). I don't know whether the actual on-the-ground Navajo community agrees, but there's no particular evidence to suggest they don't. Which, like, that's the opposite of how preserving your culture works, refusing to spread your memes means that your culture can either retain its current strength or grow weaker, but will never become stronger. A really good Skinwalker movie with a Navajo protagonist with lots of properly handled Navajo lore in it would give the Navajo people considerable soft power for as long as the movie remained relevant. But individual Navajo have the right to decide for themselves whether or not they want to refuse to share their culture's stories as a matter of principle, and it would appear that the majority of them have decided to do that. Tiny fragments of Navajo culture crumbling through the firewall unmoored from the greater cultural narrative is the wholly predictable result of erecting the firewall in the first place, but it's still a dick move to personally contribute to the problem.

tl;dr yes Paizo's handling of skinwalkers was bad, and even if the Navajo wanted to propagate their culture, which they do not, Paizo still would've been better off calling their lycanthrope race something else and writing something recognizably Navajo in their skinwalker lore rather than something generically lycanthropic.

[OgreBattle]

Bear serkers were jacking each other off?!

[Thaluikhain]

Weremonsters in European folklore are mostly not very much like modern Werewolf depictions either. I mean, "Dogs of God," male mutual masturbation societies, bear sark raiders, and so on. If you made a D&D monster out of a skinwalker it's going to take more from Dungeons & Dragons and modern American fantasy than from Navajo beliefs about shamanism, but then Werewolves in D&D take more from modern fantasy and other D&D tropes than it does from any identifiable European superstitions

Certainly. But European werewolves aren't really part of any extant culture, AFAIK. There's no real group left to insult or misrepresent or anything.

Also, hasn't "were" become a very generic term for that sort of thing, not limited to European ideas?

I don't know what the cultural term for public domain is, but I think they'd apply to them in a way they don't to skinwalkers.

[Username17]

Certainly. But European werewolves aren't really part of any extant culture, AFAIK. There's no real group left to insult or misrepresent or anything.

Also, hasn't "were" become a very generic term for that sort of thing, not limited to European ideas?

I don't know what the cultural term for public domain is, but I think they'd apply to them in a way they don't to skinwalkers.

All culture is public domain. The idea that anyone can own your ability to tell derivative stories is offensive and insane. Also, it's note like the Norwegians and Greeks aren't real people. The people who brought us Berserkers and King Lycaon are very much still alive - they just don't "own" those stories in a way that keeps you from telling your own because no one can own stories like that.

When people exist and are marginalized, you shouldn't tell stories in a way that further marginalizes them. Telling stories based on the "thieving gypsy" stereotype or the "lazy negro" stereotype is not cool. But it's bad because you're hurting real people, not because minstrel shows and late 19th century European folkstories aren't public domain.

Bear serkers were jacking each other off?!

Not specifically. There were genuinely parts of Europe where at various times there were "werewolf" groups who basically met outside town once a month for gay sex in the woods. The fact that this was a real thing has caused some people to try to tell us that all lycanthropy stories were about gay sex, but that's not true. A lot of lycanthropy stories are about completely non-sexual things like getting into fights or catching deadly diseases.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Also, it's note like the Norwegians and Greeks aren't real people. The people who brought us Berserkers and King Lycaon are very much still alive

Their descendants (in the case of the ancient Greeks, some hundred generations removed) are still alive, but the culture is not.

IMHO, an extant culture needs to be treated carefully in a way an extinct culture does not.

When people exist and are marginalized, you shouldn't tell stories in a way that further marginalizes them. Telling stories based on the "thieving gypsy" stereotype or the "lazy negro" stereotype is not cool. But it's bad because you're hurting real people, not because minstrel shows and late 19th century European folkstories aren't public domain.

Certainly, but I'd also say misrepresenting them is also a problem (if not to the same extent). Saying, for example, that all Rabbis are werewolves isn't the same as saying that, all priests of Zeus some thousands of years ago were werewolves. Stargate can say that all Norse/Greek/Egyptian deities were really aliens pretending to be gods, but they didn't say that Yahweh was really an alien pretending to be a god, because the latter's religion still exists and the formers' do not.

[OgreBattle]

Found one: https://www.dailyxtra.com/a-gay-werewol ... tury-72100

Knight turns into werewolf, his wife leaves him for it, he becomes the pet of the king and sleeps with him to restore his humanity.

[saithorthepyro]

There's currently a thread on the Paizo boards called Why are hazards so damn powerful?!

I'd link it but I'm pretty sure we aren't supposed to anymore, but I will see if you want a good laugh about how the RPG industry still hasn't made traps work at all in a way that feels fair, balanced, or even having a point. The fact that combined with the new crit rules some traps can now instant kill you under their rules isn't surprising. I will say, I do like that an actual edition war seeming to break out if helping the forums for once.

[WiserOdin032402]

Good god the amount of brain rot in that thread is astounding. A lot of people are actually defending dropping traps on players that are 3 or more levels above them in 'level very much matters' edition. From what I can tell, traps are designed to be balanced for the level they're encountered at like all things in PF2, but the module designers seem to think that they can ignore guidelines present for trap design and set all parts of the trap to 'go fuck yourself'.

I mean obviously players aren't supposed to be going there at that level but there's nothing in the module stopping them so obviously, to those with the rot, they shouldn't have gone there. What fucking horseshit.

+17 to-hit on a fucking level 4 trap my guy? 'Hurr but it only does 4d6+3 damage' bull-fucking shit that thing crits and drops anyone that isn't a main fighter. It feels like we've gone back to 'everyone needs a rogue with trapfinding because traps will kill you instantly' design. I thought this was supposed to be a step forward, not back.

[saithorthepyro]

Honestly it spreads to a lot of threads. I've started posting there again, and my credibility is shot if anyone there spots me here, but eh, it's the Paizo forums. I can't think of many platforms I care less about my reputation on. I really don't get the narrative traps argument that got peddled either. Traps don't make for narrative tools