Pathfinder 2e

[GâtFromKI]

"Checks seem really swingy and specialists kinda suck at their jobs" seem to be recurring themes in feedback so far.

I don't know how they thought that level-based DC chart was a good idea. There are inklings of the idea that most tasks shouldn't have higher level equivalents, but instead of just defining those tasks with DCs they built that abomination and included the advice "If you’re not sure how difficult something significant should be, use a high-difficulty DC for the party’s level." So you're back in 4e territory where you can kinda-sorta get the idea the designers know a wall shouldn't get harder to climb when a higher level character is trying to climb it, but the actual advice the book gives you is "Fuck it, it does."

Actually, they insist on the fact you shouldn't use the party level ("It’s important that you don’t simply make the DC arbitrarily higher or lower with the PCs’ level. Any increase must be justified based on how the challenge actually increased, and thus how success is more impressive. [...] Many tasks are not opposed and have no reason to change in level. If you decide climbing the ordinary pine tree next to the temple is a level 0 task, climbing it doesn’t arbitrarily get harder when the PCs are higher level; its level stays 0. If you need a task with a significantly higher DC to challenge your PCs, you should choose one that’s inherently harder rather than artificially inflating the level of a simple task to increase its DC. For instance, when the PCs’ level is relatively low, they might be faced with climbing a stone wall with handholds, but later in the campaign they should encounter tougher obstacles, like a smooth iron wall.").

It doesn't make their advice more useable, since they don't really state what a level 0 task is, what a level 5 task is, what a level 10 task is. They have examples in the table p 338, so we can understand "level 0-1: anyone can do it; level 3 : a real-world expert does it consistently; level 5: still doable by real-world humans, but quite an heroic feat". But there isn't any task beyond level 5, so no one know what a level 10 task is, and how it is different from a level 15 task. And they use "climb" as an example, which shouldn't even be a skill at level 10. But still, they insist on not using the party level to set DCs.

[Chamomile]

So it's just a regular DC chart, but with uselessly vague benchmarks and a few labels that serve no purpose except to potentially mislead GMs as to how the system works, plus some advice that says "if you can't figure out what to do from our ephemeral facade of a DC chart, just default to shitting on player agency."

[Pariah Dog]

The Take 10,20,30 sucks when referenced to that asspull DC vs level chart.

Shields suck and can actual LOWER your AC if you try to hold one while not proficient.

Plate Mail now apparently weighs between 20 and 40 lbs with their new weight system.

Holding a 2 handed weapon and opening a door takes your entire turn. (Action 1: Remove 1 hand from weapon, Action 2: Open door with free hand, Action 3: Resume 2 handed grip.

I don't have the image for it but whoever wrote the "one spell fits all alignments" variation of Holy World looks like they ran it through a translator a few times and spat out the result.

[GâtFromKI]

Paladins have access to several oath at level 2. eg an oath to slay undeads or an oath to slay evil dragons.

You’ve sworn an oath to end the plague of undead. Add the following tenet to your paladin’s code after the other tenets: “You must end the existence of undead you come across as long as you have a reasonable chance of success; in the unlikely event you find a good undead, you can try to work out a more peaceful way to help it recover from its undead state rather than destroying it in combat, such as helping it complete its unfinished business.”

Whenever an undead within your reach hits an ally or friendly creature and you use that action as a trigger for your Retributive Strike reaction, your Retrributive Strike does not take the –2 penalty. You don’t ever consider undead to be legitimate authorities, even in nations ruled by undead.

You’ve sworn an oath to slay evil dragons. Add the following tenet to your paladin’s code after the other tenets: “You must slay evil dragons you come across as long as you have a reasonable chance of success.”
Whenever an evil dragon within your reach hits an ally or friendly creature and you use that action as a trigger for your Retributive Strike reaction, your Retrributive Strike does not take the –2 penalty. You don’t ever consider evil dragons to be legitimate authorities, even in nations ruled by evil dragons.

So I guess a paladin without this kind of oath can't do anything in a land diriged by an evil creature, as long as the creature is legitimate (eg Dracula or Strahd Von Zarovich).

"We must defeat Palpatine, he's creating an evil empire with space nazis!
- Lol, no. The senate gave him full power. He's the legitimate ruler."

... Oh, and given the 4th tenet of paladin's code, they have to follow the law of the country - as long as the authority is lawful and the ruler legitimate.
"Wait, aren't you a Jedi? Palpatine declared force-usage is illegal and all Jedi shall be killed on sigth!"

[maglag]

Paladins have access to several oath at level 2. eg an oath to slay undeads or an oath to slay evil dragons.

You’ve sworn an oath to end the plague of undead. Add the following tenet to your paladin’s code after the other tenets: “You must end the existence of undead you come across as long as you have a reasonable chance of success; in the unlikely event you find a good undead, you can try to work out a more peaceful way to help it recover from its undead state rather than destroying it in combat, such as helping it complete its unfinished business.”

Whenever an undead within your reach hits an ally or friendly creature and you use that action as a trigger for your Retributive Strike reaction, your Retrributive Strike does not take the –2 penalty. You don’t ever consider undead to be legitimate authorities, even in nations ruled by undead.

You’ve sworn an oath to slay evil dragons. Add the following tenet to your paladin’s code after the other tenets: “You must slay evil dragons you come across as long as you have a reasonable chance of success.”
Whenever an evil dragon within your reach hits an ally or friendly creature and you use that action as a trigger for your Retributive Strike reaction, your Retrributive Strike does not take the –2 penalty. You don’t ever consider evil dragons to be legitimate authorities, even in nations ruled by evil dragons.

So I guess a paladin without this kind of oath can't do anything in a land diriged by an evil creature, as long as the creature is legitimate (eg Dracula or Strahd Von Zarovich).

"We must defeat Palpatine, he's creating an evil empire with space nazis!
- Lol, no. The senate gave him full power. He's the legitimate ruler."

The key word here is "slay". The paladin can't slay Palpatine, but there's plenty of other ways to oppose the evil empire.

You know, like Luke himself also ended up refusing to kill Palpatine after three movies of opposing his evil empire.

... Oh, and given the 4th tenet of paladin's code, they have to follow the law of the country - as long as the authority is lawful and the ruler legitimate.

"Wait, aren't you a Jedi? Palpatine declared force-usage is illegal and all Jedi shall be killed on sigth!"

I'm pretty sure that Palpatine didn't pass such laws. All the jedi killing is black ops stuff done under the rug and later on Palpatine actually wants to capture Luke alive.

Then of course when Palpatine builds a giant planet-destroying weapon to terriffy his own people, he doesn't sound that legitimate anymore.

[GâtFromKI]

The key word here is "slay". The paladin can't slay Palpatine, but there's plenty of other ways to oppose the evil empire.

No. The keyword is "legitimate authorities".

You must respect the lawful authority of the legitimate ruler or leadership in whichever land you may be, following their laws unless they violate a higher tenet.

Destroying the Death Star isn't "respecting the lawful authority of the legitimate ruler", and I'm pretty sure it breaks a few laws. Not considering Palpatine as "legitimate authority" costs a feat, that's the whole point of the oaths (that, and a stupid circumstantial bonus that will come into play once per campaign).

I'm pretty sure that Palpatine didn't pass such laws.

I don't know if this is cannon, and I don't care as I don't care about your stupid "counter-argument". Palpatine would create such a law if his universe were filled with lawful stupid people who have to follow any law "from the legitimate ruler".

Then of course when Palpatine builds a giant planet-destroying weapon to terriffy his own people, he doesn't sound that legitimate anymore.

lol.

"USA has access to nuclear weapons, their government isn't legitimate anymore!".

You're stupid.

"Possessing a Death Star" doesn't make Palpatine any more or less legitimate. If he was legitimate without a Death Star, he's still legitimate with a Death Star.

He uses the Death Star only on the enemies of the Empire - Aldorande is the enemy of the empire because Palpatine is the one deciding who is enemy of the Empire, and he can do that because he is the legitimate ruler of the Empire.

You could argue the second tenet of the code forces any Paladin to protect Aldorande. Except Aldorande is part of the Empire; Aldorande's citizens aren't innocent at the moment the Empire says so, and the second tenet doesn't apply.

[Mioor]

Ewww, these sentences just stink of grognards' neck beard. What is the den's solution? Iirc it is just give out a code of conduct or select several things that the character swore allegiance to and let the player do whatever they want.

[maglag]

You could argue the second tenet of the code forces any Paladin to protect Aldorande. Except Aldorande is part of the Empire; Aldorande's citizens aren't innocent at the moment the Empire says so, and the second tenet doesn't apply.

So you're saying that a "legitimate" government can just declare billions of their own citizens guilty, sentence them to death and carry out their execution at the drop of a hat?

That's beyond retarded, even by your standards.

[infected slut princess]

Pathfucker 2E looks pretty retarded so far. I don't think I've seen a good idea yet.

And that Paladin oath stuff is just beyond retarded. I am generally fine with the 3x3 alignment thing if you keep it extremely abstract and don't think about it too much, but the "legitimate authority" thing is just too retarded to handle.

[Kaelik]

You could argue the second tenet of the code forces any Paladin to protect Aldorande. Except Aldorande is part of the Empire; Aldorande's citizens aren't innocent at the moment the Empire says so, and the second tenet doesn't apply.

So you're saying that a "legitimate" government can just declare billions of their own citizens guilty, sentence them to death and carry out their execution at the drop of a hat?

That's beyond retarded, even by your standards.

If the Legitimate government owns a fucking galaxy, then one planet is, within the scheme of things, super fucking tiny fraction of that galaxy. In terms of fractions of the state, it's basically smaller than a raid on Waco Compound.

Now, in fact, thing those people were "guilty" of, they actually were guilty of, it was fomenting rebellion and or assisting thereof, they were totally doing that, depending on what you take as cannon. The reason blowing up Alderaan is "bad" is not because the legitimate authority can't punish a planet for the sins of it's leaders, hey, just ask all those fucking southerners we killed and then denied the ability to appoint senators and house members to while we passed laws that controlled them. It's that blowing up Alderaan is bad both because of disproportionate response (like how the US is bad for dropping nukes on Japan, but not bad for dropping regular bombs on Japanese Factories even though those DEFINITELY killed innocent people too) and because they are rebelling against an evil government, so punishing them at all is bad. It's mostly the second one, since storm troopers rounding people up and trying them for treason is also pretty bad.

So yeah my dude, no part of this shit is because legitimate governments can't act in ways that harm groups, it's 100% because the premise of the movies is that the legitimate government is bad, and should be overthrown.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Eh, I don't know how much I like Pathfinder 2e. It's not much, I might switch to 5e.

[Username17]

Ewww, these sentences just stink of grognards' neck beard. What is the den's solution? Iirc it is just give out a code of conduct or select several things that the character swore allegiance to and let the player do whatever they want.

Alignments are horrible and don't do anything good for anything. The basic issue is the proscriptive role playing hooks discourage action and engagement with the story. If you define the code that the player character can't do things, you've already fucked up. If you're discussing whether a Paladin is allowed to oppose an evil dragon king, you are not winning. Roleplaying hooks should encourage - not discourage - action and engagement. And it's not like we don't have a functional model of this! White Wolf of all people had Natures that gave you a small bonus of metacurrency whenever you did a particular thing in your roleplaying. That's all you need, and it's good instead of bad like AD&D alignments that have the DM punish you for acting a way the DM thinks you should not.

But aside from alignments and characters prompts needing to be defined in a positive rather than negative fashion with regards to characters acting and interacting with their environment - there's also the thing where the 9 alignments wheel is fucking awful and would literally be better if it was replaced with a handful of primary and secondary colors. I'm not even fucking kidding, the concept of "Lawful Good" is so fucking awful and toxic and meaningless and shit that players would get more relevant information imparted to them about what their character was about by having to choose a favorite color such as Green or Purple.

Paladins should have a "Driving Motivation" and get minor bonuses when pursuing that motivation. That's fucking it. That's all you need. And complex codes and weird fucking alignment definition essays are actively destructive to the hobby. And the ones they've written for PF2 so far are bad even accepting the fundamental reality that they couldn't have been good.

-Username17

[Stubbazubba]

You could argue the second tenet of the code forces any Paladin to protect Aldorande. Except Aldorande is part of the Empire; Aldorande's citizens aren't innocent at the moment the Empire says so, and the second tenet doesn't apply.

They actually tried to refute this kind of circular reasoning by the explicit example they give where the 2nd tenet trumps the 3rd (and implicitly the 4th) tenet, but they have to introduce a vague, contradictory term to get there which hides the fact that they have solved nothing of the underlying problems:

For instance, if an evil king asked you if innocent lawbreakers were hiding in your church so he could execute them, you could lie to him, since the tenet forbidding you to lie is less important than the tenet prohibiting the harm of an innocent.

Emphasis added.

The likely intended reading of the term "innocent lawbreakers" is that "innocent" means innocent to the morality upheld by your Lawful or Good deity (because Paladins must follow a deity that is Lawful or Good and neither Chaotic nor Evil) while "lawbreakers" means in violation of the actual law of the land. That is not, of course, the only way to interpret that example, but it's probably what they meant in light of the example they gave.

Of course that just kicks the can down the road to the fact that each deity now needs a moral code that Paladins can refer to when legitimate authorities seek to impose laws that don't strictly align with their deity's moral code. And of course, no such moral codes appear in the book, and there is even less to go on in the Deities Table than there is in the Paladin's Code for trying to suss out what they might be.

So if an evil king were actually to ask a Paladin of, uh, Abadar if there were lawbreakers hiding in her church, the Paladin now has a divide by zero problem where she has no indication of what Abadar considers innocence and so cannot evaluate which tenet even applies.

[Jason]

So you're saying that a "legitimate" government can just declare billions of their own citizens guilty, sentence them to death and carry out their execution at the drop of a hat?

That's beyond retarded, even by your standards.

Please explain to me, how this has any effect on the legitimacy of a rule. Wikipedia seems to disagree.

EDIT: dropped the URL, because bbcode hates parentheses

[MisterDee]

Dropping alignment and just having an [evil] tag on things like devils, free-willed bad undeads, ancient lizard monstrosities and Ted Cruzes/Zodiac Killers would work so much better.

Even the Paladins should comply with laws bit would work better without the goddamn system. Sure, NPC paladins look at the evil but stable society and go "you know what, they may be evil but the trains run on time so taking this down would be a bad idea." But if the goddamn PLAYER character thinks "I'll bet these guys would prefer it if we put back the Rightful Heir Prince Dogooder on the throne", then they should certainly feel free to try.

[brized]

So you're saying that a "legitimate" government can just declare billions of their own citizens guilty, sentence them to death and carry out their execution at the drop of a hat?

That's beyond retarded, even by your standards.

How do you define "legitimate"? Several real-world governments did just as you described in the 20th century, just at a scale of millions rather than billions.

Nazi Germany and Democratic Kampuchea didn't fall to internal revolution, and they weren't voted out of power. They were ousted by foreign countries they declared war upon. Were their governments legitimate?

The Soviet Union dissolved from within after ~69 years, long after widespread dissemination of the terrors of the gulag system and its repercussions. Yet there's no shortage of people today who regard Lenin, Stalin, and their government as something to look up to. Was their government legitimate? If not, why?

The Republic of Turkey massacred millions of its own citizens, and was never held accountable for it. In 2016 there was an unrelated attempted coup, but that failed. So what about them?

Mao Zedong's PRC still exists to this day, despite one-upping the Soviet Union in deaths by executions and famine.

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were killed in attacks on "counter-revolutionaries" during the years 1950–1952.[176] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[177] the number of deaths range between 2 million[177][178] and 5 million.[179][180] In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[181] perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[182] were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished.[182] Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[183] which were often exceeded.[173] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[184]

Their citizens keep voting for the status quo, and can't or won't organize a revolution. Is their government legitimate?

[DrPraetor]

The basic issue is the proscriptive role playing hooks discourage action and engagement with the story. If you define the code that the player character can't do things, you've already fucked up. If you're discussing whether a Paladin is allowed to oppose an evil dragon king, you are not winning. Roleplaying hooks should encourage - not discourage - action and engagement.

That's a bit of an oversimplification, because the tyranny of choice is very real.

First, alignments in general have an advantage if everyone puts the same alignment, because they deny their authentic freedom and pretend they have no choice but to play along with the concept of the game.

take a piece of paper and write in big letters across the top: i kill puppies for satan.

Second, prescriptive codes close off choices which holds the nausea at bay helps to deal with tyranny of choice. Tyranny of choice can be a real problem in an RPG because it is a sandbox and you can do anything which makes it hard to do one thing. Are you saying that Batman's Code vs Killing doesn't serve as a roleplaying prompt for Batman?

Also, most people want a social contract when they sit down at the table that the other players don't want to imagine their alter-egos enslaving as many orphans as they can catch.


Surprise! It's SFW!

I don't disagree with the general guideline, that prompts for action are usually more helpful than prohibitions against conduct - and prohibitions against conduct which might be construed to include doing the adventure are right out (thus D&D characters cannot, for example, be committed pacifists.) But both a jingoistic declaration of in-group membership and a written commitment not to squick the other players are, among others, nice outcomes to achieve.

[MGuy]

Instead of alignments putting players on the same team by having the players elect the same alignments you could just literally put them on the same team without all the stupid that comes from alignments. Also what do you mean by tyranny of choice in this case?

[Omegonthesane]

Sounds like he's on about option paralysis to me - the thing where if you have too many things on the menu it's a lot harder to just pick one.

[Stubbazubba]

How do you define "legitimate"? Several real-world governments did just as you described in the 20th century, just at a scale of millions rather than billions.

There is a fairly strong school of thought in international affairs which holds that when a government commits sufficiently massive atrocities against its own people, that government is illegitimate. Certainly in the eyes of the people who are being atrocity-ed, and also in the eyes of many other nation-states. This is the underpinning of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, plus all of their progeny and related treaties. The U.N.'s quasi-legal "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine is pretty much a straight up expression of what the covenants only implied: willfully and maliciously violating the rights of your own people suspends your sovereignty and makes the situation a valid target for international intervention and subject for prosecution for crimes against humanity.

Now, that's not to say this is a dominant school of thought. It's mocked as idealistic by many and criticized as quasi-colonial imperialism by others, and the narrow world incidents that its proponents point to as evidence of its validity only prove that the theory's concerns are always secondary to power politics. But it's a perfectly mainstream one and there are plenty of respected world figures who spend their entire careers trying to advance it.

Given the apparently lawful way the Galactic Empire came to be and its apparent ability to maintain day-to-day law & order and manage a galaxy-spanning mixed economy, it is clearly something along these lines that gives the rebels their cassus belli. It is decidedly not the sense of legitimacy implied by the P2e Paladin Oaths, though, which do equate rule with legitimacy.

Their citizens keep voting for the status quo, and can't or won't organize a revolution. Is their government legitimate?

I mean, no, the PRC does not vote for its national government. Some rural villages vote for local leaders, but the national government is unelected. They did try a bit of a revolution once, or at least a mass protest. It's a meme now.

[tussock]

Back to pathfinder 2.

Being quick is easy, eventually. The 4th attack can be useful if you build for it.

Step, as in 5' step, is an action though, which is a pain, because monsters can step back instead of making their third junk attack and prevent you using your full attacks if you build for them. But also take junk attacks instead if you don't. Meta stuff like that is just annoying in a game.

Laser clerics end up with 10d6+7 or so at will, but only really 60 odd average damage at best because they can't make use of the -10 or -15 attacks, while a two handed weapon ends up near 65 damage per hit (9d12+7), and around 170 damage average with a few reach extenders available, and auto-trips or whatever, which 2-rounds every solo in the book with a few support hits coming in around 30-40 each.

Still not sure what Wizards do, action denial really hurts some PC builds, but mostly your 3rd action, you don't miss it as a monster, maybe useful for closing for a special 2-action melee attack, but eh. Possibly protection stuff, being invisible is quite strong, maybe they'll got some good debuffs somewhere, divide up the bigger fights I guess.

So, pouring support onto a dedicated damage dealer, just the way the game scales means you're usually wasting your time to do more than your first attack and then just use whatever support actions, positioning, conditions, for helping the best placed melee guy. Flanked or Prone is -2 circumstance to AC, that's very handy.

Probably the Fighter winning on damage, gets a steeper curve all the time, benefits so strongly from support. Anyway, don't think shield matters, floating shields cheap, but big stacks of d12 are better than anything I can find, and look like they'll work all day with a bunch of low level at-will support, or get down into sort of 3+ on the 2nd attack with higher level support and focused stacking of AC penalties and attack boosts.

Can probably target anything like that, penalties to saves and bonuses to save or die DC, but most of those require critical hits and are very limited use so it's unlikely to be profitable as a standard game plan. Maybe fear, but eh, that's not dead.

Ranged attacks and spell damage, sort of feels like something to do, rather than being useful in itself, contributes enough from the whole party, but the +/- stuff for the Fighter is worth more damage on average for the same cost.

--

Characters doing their own thing is just relatively weak. Giving someone stronk +2 to hit is way better than most things you can do yourself as most classes, at least after your first couple actions are gone. Attack spells I've looked at are pretty weak really, outside the crits, and yeah, don't seem sensible to chase.

Damage Restistance is a pain in the ass unless you go heavy weapon on it, stacking everything on one weapon means your primary just has to punch it from very early on, Regeneration is huge if you don't get things killed right now. Fricken trolls are 20/round.

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Speaking of, I expect campaigns to randomly fall over when a Troll just rolls 20s and gets claw crit, claw crit, rend, claw hit, rend in one round. Basically every single monster every round has that 3.0 style Orc Greataxe crit just waiting to murder a random PC when the 20's come up for about 5x the average damage of a hit, or 9x as a troll.

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And for fuck's sake, China elects it's government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

It's single party, but anyone can join it, and just like in US primaries, you vote for who will represent you in your party. You vote for the local guy, they vote for the next tier, the next tier votes for tier 3, all the way to the top. Did you fucking notice in the United States of America how the fucking President is elected by ELECTORS, who are hand picked by the winning party in each state, in response to a popular vote in each state, give or take for doing whatever the fuck they want within the limits of the state's laws. It's not even different, it's just got a few more layers, and one less party, so the one-party "republicans" would be half democrats, actually over half.

Like, google, people.[/spoiler[

[Axebird]

Laser clerics end up with 10d6+7 or so at will, but only really 60 odd average damage

I'm assuming by "laser clerics" you mean the Fire domain. Domain powers are not at will, you get Wis spell points per day, and a few more based on the class feats you take. Fire Ray costs one of those, and takes two actions- so you can only cast one each round. 42 is not 60, and it takes a limited resource.

at best because they can't make use of the -10 or -15 attacks

There's no such thing as a -15 attack. Multiple attack penalty caps at two instances, which is -10 for most characters.

, while a two handed weapon ends up near 65 damage per hit (9d12+7)

A +5 greatsword or greataxe deals 6d12 damage. A character with the Power Attack fighter class feat deals 8d12, which kinda sucks since it takes two actions.

and around 170 damage average

I don't believe you.

with a few reach extenders available

Specifically "being a giant barbarian that turns into a giant and takes a to-hit and AC penalty" and "using a reach weapon that does less damage" and nothing else.

and auto-trips or whatever

The only things I can assume you mean by "auto-trips" are Monk Wolf Drag which is a 2 action attack that knocks the target prone on a hit, and Fighter Knockdown which does likewise. You still have to hit, which is absolutely not a foregone conclusion anymore.

which 2-rounds every solo in the book with a few support hits coming in around 30-40 each.

I'm pretty sure you're just assuming all attacks hit forever at this point.

Still not sure what Wizards do, action denial really hurts some PC builds, but mostly your 3rd action, you don't miss it as a monster, maybe useful for closing for a special 2-action melee attack, but eh. Possibly protection stuff, being invisible is quite strong, maybe they'll got some good debuffs somewhere, divide up the bigger fights I guess.

Spells are primarily for buffing and sometimes blowing away minion trash that's a few levels beneath you. Most control spells only do anything meaningful on a critical failure, and those only happen 5-15% of the time against the worst save of same level opponents.

So, pouring support onto a dedicated damage dealer, just the way the game scales means you're usually wasting your time to do more than your first attack and then just use whatever support actions, positioning, conditions, for helping the best placed melee guy. Flanked or Prone is -2 circumstance to AC, that's very handy.

If you're a martial you literally have nothing else better to do than attack, and depending on your class you might have a bunch of abilities you can only use after you make an attack.

Probably the Fighter winning on damage, gets a steeper curve all the time, benefits so strongly from support. Anyway, don't think shield matters, floating shields cheap, but big stacks of d12 are better than anything I can find, and look like they'll work all day with a bunch of low level at-will support, or get down into sort of 3+ on the 2nd attack with higher level support and focused stacking of AC penalties and attack boosts.

Fighter is comparable with barbarian for most of the game, then the barbarian turns into a fucking dragon suddenly and ditches their sword. Floating shield is an uncommon item, you're not allowed to buy it. "Working all day" isn't an important bullet point when you rest when your casters are empty anyway. Buffs and debuffs largely don't stack at all. None of the bonus or penalty types stack. A Sluggish 2, Flat-footed, Prone, Blind, Paralyzed, and Fatigued target is at -2 AC, period.

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Characters doing their own thing is just relatively weak. Giving someone stronk +2 to hit is way better than most things you can do yourself as most classes, at least after your first couple actions are gone. Attack spells I've looked at are pretty weak really, outside the crits, and yeah, don't seem sensible to chase.

You cast them into piles of minions. Fireballing people your level is a massive waste of time and effort.

Damage Restistance is a pain in the ass unless you go heavy weapon on it, stacking everything on one weapon means your primary just has to punch it from very early on, Regeneration is huge if you don't get things killed right now. Fricken trolls are 20/round.

These are not new problems. It's still PF1 regeneration that turns off if you hit them for 1 point of the relevant damage type, so the wizard that was probably just going to be durdling in the back tosses an acid splash that automatically deals splash damage.

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Speaking of, I expect campaigns to randomly fall over when a Troll just rolls 20s and gets claw crit, claw crit, rend, claw hit, rend in one round. Basically every single monster every round has that 3.0 style Orc Greataxe crit just waiting to murder a random PC when the 20's come up for about 5x the average damage of a hit, or 9x as a troll.

There aren't any negative hitpoints anymore, and you can cheat death with one of your three hero points for the session to stabilize at 1 hp with no stacks of dying. It's really fucking hard to actually die now, it pretty much needs to be a TPK or nothing.

[Username17]

The construction of alignment is shit. Everything about it is shit. It has been known to be shit for longer than I have been alive.

All the incentives run the wrong way. A good motivation would be to give the player a small advantage every time they acted for justice. Penalizing a character every time the DM felt their actions seemed Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral is fucked.

The team flavors are bullshit. If you're going to use Alignments as teams, you need to have them be few enough in number that the players could plausibly all be on the same team. Or have the teams be sufficiently morally arbitrary that the game supports players from different teams in the same party. Alliance versus Horde is fine, and different Vampire clans in the same coterie is fine. But nine different factions where some of them are Chaotic Fucking Evil is right the fuck out.

-Username17

[GâtFromKI]

No one understand how shield block works. Not even the designers.

You have to go though the whole book to understand how counterspell (a fucking level 1 feat) works, and at that point you discover it doesn't work.

Paladins are designed to be unplayable.

Encumbrance seems to be abstracted and simplified, using single-digit numbers... Until you discover most bullshit items count for 0.1 Bulk. Because having an encumbrance of 2.7 bulk (or "2 bulk, 7L") is so much easier than an encumbrance of 27 pounds. Then you buy a bag of holding to ignore encumbrance, and you discover it costs 1 resonance each time you open it: there's no way to avoid cumbersome micro-management. It's D&D: the accounting.

All magic item use resonance, except those who don't (weapon. Maybe armor ?...), except those who do (Breastplate of command, celestial armor, dagger of venom...). Resonance is designed to avoid "charge per day" accounting on each item, but the sentence you read the most in the magic items chapter is "once per day". On items costing resonance. Resonance isn't a general micro-management gauge that replace a lot of micro-management gauge, it just goes on top of every micro-management gauge.

Magic armor don't need to be invested on page 370, but they need to be invested on page 397. The prices of magic armors on page 397 seems to be random, for some reason it's not the price of an armor of that quality + price of rune + price of etching the rune on the armor.

Close match is a Deception skill feat intended to remove penalties... that don't exist in the first place in the description of the Deception skill. Even worse: it removes those non-existing penalties only in specific cases. Hence, if your MC doesn't know every existing feat, as per the skill description he doesn't apply any penalty when you disguise as someone else; but at the moment you take the feat, you still have no penalty when you disguise as your close match, but you have penalty when you disguise as anything else. In effect, taking the feat gives you a penalty on most of your disguise checks.

When you casts a spell with a 10-minute-casting-time, it's disrupted at the moment the combat music start. Not when you're involved in the fight, not when you lose your concentration because someone hits you, the mere fact the combat music starts is enough to disrupt your casting. Maybe the PCs hear the combat music and see the loading screen?

Walls "cannot be shaped to make a diagonal line", because... The battlemap grid is a real object for the PCs ?

For a human, jumping 15 feet is autosuccess, jumping 20 feet is DC 25, jumping 25 feet is DC 30, jumping 30 feet is impossible. So we can retro-engineer the expectation of the game: an appropriate challenge for a level 9 party is a 20-feet-chasm, while a 25-feet-chasm is an appropriate challenge at level 12. If one of the PC is an elf, he can even be confronted to the amazing 30-feet-chasm at level 15!

There is a distance of 150 pages between the long jump and the leap rules...

p 360 : "Contact poisons are infeasible to apply to a creature via a weapon attack due to the logistics of delivering them without poisoning yourself." I guess PCs are wielding their sword by the blade - or maybe no one in golarion had the idea to apply the poison on the blade instead of the hilt. But don't panic, rogues have access to the awesome feat of applying a contact poison on their blade. The awesome feat of not being a moron.

... I could continue for a long time...

The playtest document is as long as Homothopy type theory, Pathfinder is harder to read with all the function call to other pages, it doesn't contains any example to help you understand how it works, the maths is made of randomness, it's inconsistent, and it's not even complete. In other words, for a lower wordcount than Pathfinder 2, people have defined an alternative foundation for constructive mathematics that's easier to read and understand. How can the time spent parsing Path2 be worth it?

[Zaranthan]

The prices of magic armors on page 397 seems to be random, for some reason it's not the price of an armor of that quality + price of rune + price of etching the rune on the armor.

I can't access the document at work, but are the prices actually RANDOM or are they strictly lower for pre-etched armor? It'd at least make a little sense if customizing your armor was a little more expensive than buying a piece somebody else etched for their own purposes. Grognards love telling players "you can't find somebody selling +3 mithril breastplate of greater shadows, but you CAN find somebody selling +1 leather of lesser shadows." <Insert South Park cable guy screenshot>

Maybe the PCs hear the combat music and see the loading screen?

It's like trying to start a boss fight with a charged shot in Mega Man X. If you let go of B during the cutscene and press it again, it discharges anyway.

Walls "cannot be shaped to make a diagonal line", because... The battlemap grid is a real object for the PCs ?

Well, that's one way to avoid the shitshow from D&D 3E's combat section about partial cover and squeezing into partially obstructed spaces.