Pathfinder 2e

[Foxwarrior]

Playing as an open sprite who tries to solve nearly every problem with Jingle wouldn't be nearly as funny if Jingle didn't have some defined limits and you couldn't really define the problems with much precision.

[Whatever]

Tabletop RPGs are about making a series of interesting decisions. The consequences of those decisions become the story. That means you need decision points, and that they should be meaningful. In other words, you should have some idea of the consequences of each particular choice ahead of time.

Rules give meaning to the decisions you make. That's ultimately all that they're for.

[rasmuswagner]

So, I just ran my first session of PF 2. Ugh. It really does spend hundreds of fucking pages to arrive at "GM ass-pulls a DC".

[Iduno]

In light of that, I find rules lite games, though they often consider genre conventions in a more thoughtful way than D&D (i.e.: at all), actually make WORSE prompts. If I know I'm being told to run a method acting class with a few rules for procedural generation, then I become aware of how bad I am at it. However, the artifice of squares and spell effects distracts me from the fact that what I'm really after is bad improv and subpar board game rules.

That is true, but also sense of accomplishment is usually proportional to the (perceived) difficulty. If there's no system to master, there's no sense that you did anything. If you can take a well-balanced game and find a way to have a noticeable benefit over expectations, that feels great. So when the fighter finds a way to chain 3 feats together to make a playable character, that's impressive. Mages are more fun, because you have that opportunity with every single spell you cast, but you have to pull off some real bullshit before you actually defy expectations.

[OgreBattle]

The stamina points everyone draws upon (ki, inspiration, arcane pool etc.) that refresh after a short rest is something I like, but I feel like people will point it as "video gamey ruining immersion" and lump it with PF2e failures

[GâtFromKI]

I looked at the oracle.

Instead of focus spells, he has some "special" spells/powers that are quite weak for their level. eg, a level 6 life oracle can pay a feat to get a poor's man's version of Lifelink (the level 2 spell from D&D 3) (with a duration of 1 minutes, and instead of dividing the damage between the caster and the target, it only distribute 5 damages to the caster and everything else to the target).

To balance this awesome ability of having access to weak underleveled spells (the kind of spells a character could get "at-will" as a ribbon ability), the oracle gets a huge debuff with a 1-day duration : eg, the life oracle who cast lifelink see every healing he get reduced until next day ; If he uses lifeLink (or another poor ability) once more, he can't heal anymore until next day - because why not ? Since I can't see anything else more anti-synergic with LifeLink, I guess it was a challenge between designers: to create the most shitty class ever.

So... I guess this class exists to prove the divine sorcerer isn't the shittiest class - the oracle could be defined as "a divine sorcerer without any usable non-spell ability". Since the divine sorcerer is considered as weak because divine spells are shit, you can imagine how weak is a divine sorcerer without non-spell ability.

[GâtFromKI]

playtest document, p. 15:

The first time after your daily preparations that you complete the Cast a Spell activity for a revelation spell, your minor curse manifests.

playtest document, p. 17, minor curse of the battle oracle:

Minor Curse: Your body languishes when you aren’t bringing harm to your foes. You take a –2 status penalty to AC and saving throws, but each time you make a Strike, you can suspend these penalties until the start of your next turn.

playtest document, p. 21, focus spell Battle persistence (one of the focus spell of the oracle):

Cast [reaction] verbal; Trigger You are about to roll a saving throw, but you haven’t rolled yet.
You won’t be easily removed from the clamor of battle. You gain a +2 status bonus to the triggering saving throw, and if the triggering save is against an incapacitation effect, it treats you as if you were 2 levels higher.

In other words, someone cast a spell on you, you activate your battle persistence, at the moment you finish the Cast a spell activity, two things happen:
1/ you get -2 to all save.
2/ you get +2 to the triggering save.

Best. Ability. Ever.

In all honesty, you could use the spell when under the effect of the minor curse to remove the save penalty (and worsen the curse). Alternatively, if you're not a moron, you can Strike a wall or the air ("I have the intuition there's a hidden creature here... Strike !") to remove all penalty for the round while not affecting your curse.

[Iduno]

Alternatively, if you're not a moron, you can Strike a wall or the air ("I have the intuition there's a hidden creature here... Strike !") to remove all penalty for the round while not affecting your curse.

"Of course there's an invisible enemy even though we have no reason to think there is one. I'm an Oracle. I think I know what I'm talking about."

[jt]

Rules-heavy RPGs usually have a tactical combat minigame and a pile of character creation rules that output your stats for that minigame. I don't see the point in doing this unless the CR system is spot-on. Having agreed upon combat rules makes sense - it lets everyone speak the same language - but if you're going to lean on the GM's role as supplemental game designer to balance your system, you should just go ahead and let the players/GM make the stats and abilities up at character creation. Give a pile of examples, let them pick whatever seems right, tweak it later.

In the opposite direction, I think there's room in the world for a rules-light game with heavier character creation that gives specific abilities. The character creation system outputs that you're really strong and can talk to animals, describes what sorts of things you can lift and what talking to animals is like, and stops there, without assigning a system by which you roll a dice and add your strength score to things. This is contrary to the usual rules-light pattern, where you can be anything you can imagine, but it's a foregone conclusion that doing so gives you +2 to a roll.

[GâtFromKI]

The witch get the "cackle" special action. This action is the same as the "sustain a spell" action, except:
1/ it does not have the "concentrate" tag.
2/ it has the "sonic" and the "auditory" traits.
3/ it suffer the same penalty as the one given by the "concentrate" tag (if you sustain it during 1 minutes you become fatigued).

In other words, it's exactly the same as the "sustain a spell" action, except it suffers the penalties given by the "sonic" and the "auditory" tags on top of the normal rule.

No one knows why a witch would use this action.

[Roog]

Obviously, it's because it has the same name as an action they used in the previous edition.

[Orca]

I suppose it would avoid attacks of opportunity (which can trigger off the concentrate tag) if the witch were within melee range of an enemy who had the AoO ability, and the witch didn't cast a spell that round or do anything else that could trigger an AoO, just sustained one via cackle. A fairly minor edge case really.

[GâtFromKI]

OK, it seems you have the same rule mastery as any paizil. At least, you're not posting on an official paizo forum.

The concentrate trait doesn't trigger AoO.

But hey, there's a level 10 fighter feat to enter a stance to trigger AoO on concentrate action. Cackle is level 1. So... Here's what I answered on the paizoboard:

"You're right, the ability can be very useful if my level 1 witch is in melee range of a level 10+ fighter with the disruptive stance feat and with the stance activated and I recognize the stance with my witch who doesn't have any knowledge about stances and at the same time I know for sure this fighter doesn't have any ability granting a reaction against sonic or auditory effects and the most urgent thing I have to do is to sustain a spell instead of moving away from the fighter (who's in melee range of my squishy witch, but who cares ?).

Such a common situation. In 30 years of RPG, I have seen this situation a grand total of 0 times. And I expect this number to stay the same during the next 60 years.

Maybe someone can create a more common situation where the ability does something ? Something happening once every 20 years of play maybe ?"

This isn't a minor edge case really. This is a non-existing case.

[magnuskn]

They don't need to ban their critics these days. The true believers will shout them down. 'Follow the leader' is a natural tendency which you see less of on the Den than paizo.com - there's more contrary people here - but which still is visible sometimes. Paizo's happy to encourage that tendency rather than being wary of it, so the necessary (IMO) ground-up rewrite of PF2 isn't obvious to them, and probably won't ever happen.

There's also the fact that the sizable percentage of PF1 fans have already made the decision to stick with the older books even before seeing the playtest.

Oh no, I read the playtest and then decided to stick with the 1E stuff, of which I have a pretty good collection (all hardcovers and a decent amount of softcover stuff, as well as a lot of AP's to go around for some time).

[TheGreatEvilKing]

So what changed from the shitty playtest book to the released version?

For some stupid reason I got the playtest book and it reminded me why I never get Paizo products. Did they keep the fuckawful superstition totem barbarian?

[Suzerain]

Resonance is out, untrained no longer adds level, trained+ add more than +1 per tier, monster maths is a bit fixed. That's about it.

[GâtFromKI]

monster maths is a bit fixed.

More precisely: monsters have randomly gained +1 in some stuff and -1 in other stuff - those changes are so random, it's as if the monsters were never playtested (since they don't have the same number as the playtest one at all).

In the other hand, PCs get +2 (or more) on the actions they actually use ("trained" now gives lvl+2 instead of lvl ; at max level, "legendary" gives lvl+8 instead of lvl+3, magic items give +3 instead of +5, for a total of lvl+11 instead of level+8). So they are on par with the monsters who were ~2 point too high everywhere and gained +rand(-1,1) everywhere.

They didn't "fix" the maths: they use completely different maths, and by chance the new maths works better.

[Kevin Mack]

Between the change to there errata policy, the fact there still releasing 1e books as pocket editions and there latest campaign setting book announced not having any game mechanics in it at all I suspect things are really going poorly.

[magnuskn]

They already announced way before the release of 2E that they'd still release pocket format books of 1E material as long as there was demand for it.

And the campaign setting update book actually has some 2E mechanics in it (much to my chagrin, as a 1E guy I would have vastly preferred it to not them in there). They actually released a second book, the Character Guide, which is mostly focused on new rules stuff.

[Kevin Mack]

Talking about the one thats supposed to the all npc's that apparently dosent have a single stat block in it for reasons. Inner sea legends or something it's called

[Suzerain]

Lost Omens: Legends. Of course, reviewers at Paizo are lapping it up, despite it being obvious 5e-tier non-game shovelware.

If and when these characters need stats, we will be providing them for the stories we want to tell.

There it is again. Like at the end of Bulmahn's awful post on the playtest, always talking about stories they want to tell and they want to share. Never about enabling you to tell your own.

[Iduno]

If and when these characters need stats, we will be providing them for the stories we want to tell.

There it is again. Like at the end of Bulmahn's awful post on the playtest, always talking about stories they want to tell and they want to share. Never about enabling you to tell your own.

In their defense, if you were capable of writing your own story, you would be playing a better game than anything Paizo can produce.

[GâtFromKI]

Talking about the one thats supposed to the all npc's that apparently dosent have a single stat block in it for reasons. Inner sea legends or something it's called

...

Seriously ?

...

Let me put this straight: a npc without stat block is a npc the pcs can't interact with. Especially in D&D/pathfinder: pcs can't even lie to such a npc (since lying is handled bythe stat block), they can't make a request (since this is handled by the stat block)... In other words, in D&D/pathfinder, the pcs can't even talk to a npc with no stat block.

What's the purpose of a game element the pcs can't interact with ? Why does Paizo pretend they're writing game while it's so obvious they want to write novels ?

[Kevin Mack]

To quoye one of the Paizo developers

"There won't be stat blocks for any of the characters featured in this book.

Part of the reason for this decision is that we haven't nailed down the exact level/abilities of some of the featured characters as some of them are newer or even brand new. In other cases, we don't necessarily have the rules to support every aspect of a character (e.g. gun rules for characters who use guns or stats for characters higher than 25th level).

If and when these characters need stats, we will be providing them for the stories we want to tell. In the meanwhile, keeping them without stats allows GMs to use the stats that best fit their game. For example, if you decided that Jatembe has grown weaker since the last time he was seen, he can be a lower level for your particular game.

Rather than locking in stats and forcing stories to be told at specific levels, we wanted to keep things open for all groups (and ourselves!) to tell the stories that work best for their games. For now, you can expect a lot of information on the background, personality, and relationships of the featured characters with a healthy sprinkling of plot hooks. We're excited to see everyone's feelings and reactions on the format to see if it's something that might work for similar products in the future."

Now the problem with this excuse is that since Npc's/Pc's no longer follow the same rules a lot of this is hogwash they can give them whatever stats/abilities they feel like (For Example a lack of gun rules diddent stop them from having the problematic twin guy's having firearms.)

So to me it seems more likely there trying to keep the book setting neutral (and have the advantage that at least afew of these characters have stat blocks already in 1E In fact 3 of the 4 on the front cover if I recall)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Part of the reason for this decision is that we haven't nailed down the exact level/abilities of some of the featured characters as some of them are newer or even brand new. In other cases, we don't necessarily have the rules to support every aspect of a character (e.g. gun rules for characters who use guns or stats for characters higher than 25th level).

"We don't have rules to support these concepts, so we shoved it out the door since we knew people would buy it anyway. Don't forget to buy our Path of the Gunslinger supplement, coming Summer 2020!"