Pathfinder 2e

[deaddmwalking]

It's quite possible that things will change, but I want to agree that at the moment, under the 'Amazon Best Sellers' for the 'Gaming Category' (under Science Fiction & Fantasy) the Player's Handbook is #1 followed by the Pathfinder Core Rulebook at #2. The best sellers are updated hourly, but that still seems like a bad place for Pathfinder to debut.

And it's not because everyone is opting for the Special Edition version. That's #53.

[GâtFromKI]

an example of a level 9 common spell:

RESPLENDENT MANSION
Spell 9
Conjuration
Traditions arcane, occult
Cast 1 minute (material, somatic, verbal)
Range 500 feet; Duration until the next time you make your daily preparations

You conjure a towering mansion up to four stories tall and up to 300 feet on a side. While Casting the Spell, you hold an image of the mansion and its desired appearance in your mind. The mansion can contain as many or as few rooms as you desire, and it is decorated as you imagine it. You can imagine a purpose for each room of the mansion, and the proper accouterments appear within. Any furniture or other mundane fixtures function normally for anyone inside the mansion, but they cease to exist if taken beyond its walls. No fixture created with this spell can create magical effects, but magical devices brought into the mansion function normally.

Your mansion contains the same types and quantities of foodstuffs and servants as created by the magnificent mansion spell.

Each of the mansion’s exterior doorways and windows are protected by alarm spells. You choose whether each alarm is audible or mental as you Cast the Spell, and each has a different sound (for an audible alarm) or sensation (for a mental one), allowing you to instantly determine which portal has been used.

Behold the incredible power of high-level magic : you create some mundane tower protected with level 1 spells, containing food as if you used another low-level spell; you can't bring any mundane object outside the tower and you can't even prepare your spell in your tower (since it disappear at the moment you prepare your spells).

...PF 2 is so sad and bland...

[Axebird]

To be fair, that one's a legacy reference to mordenkainen's magnificent mansion. It's the slightly higher level version that makes a real mansion instead of a portal to an extradimensional space shaped like one. I'm pretty sure the level 7 version has a door that turns invisible when everyone's inside though, so why you'd give a shit about casting this one is beyond me, it seems way worse.

[RelentlessImp]

That's... really pathetic. You got an extradimensional mansion out of a seventh level spell in 3.5. But that's really Pathfinder all over; the developers have basically no imagination.

[Axebird]

That's... really pathetic. You got an extradimensional mansion out of a seventh level spell in 3.5. But that's really Pathfinder all over; the developers have basically no imagination.

What? Magnificent mansion is a 7th level spell in PF2 as well. This is the 9th level version, because Paizo thinks a real mansion is more impressive for some reason.

[Orca]

The real question is, what does PF2 do well? What is its selling point? With any RPG you can find a dozen things it doesn't do well, that's no big deal.

If the only answer is 'it does dungeon crawls with less variance between characters than D&D 3.x/PF1, and more depth than D&D 5e' that's hardly going to attract players in the long term IMO. If there's other answers I don't see them.

[Username17]

The real question is, what does PF2 do well? What is its selling point?

I think the answer to that is "nothing" for the same reason that the interaction tags are such a clusterfuck.

When you make a game as an insane labor of love, like ACKS, it will have some good stuff in it. It will do things that are pretty cool. If, on the other hand, it's a labor of filling in the blanks and having neckbeards make suggestions - then there's no core. It's just layer after layer of people saying "What if we...?"

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Pathfinder 2 is Runequest: The Next Generation. It's for people who liked <other game> and want more fiddly bits. That's it.

[RelentlessImp]

Does it have more fiddly bits? Last time I took a look at PF2 it was optimize your numbers or get fucked.

[malak]

DoesLast time I took a look at PF2 it was optimize your numbers or get fucked.

Do you have a few examples for that?

[Orca]

There's not that much variance in the numbers you get assuming you put at least a 16 in your attack stat. Assuming you don't go off the rails and try to make a barbarian who fights unarmed or something anyway (bad barbarian! Fighting unarmed is for monks!)

Since the bonuses pull double duty in getting you across the thresholds for success and critical success they matter ~ twice as much for the damage done as the same bonus would do in D&D 3.x.

[Username17]

This was the prediction from page 1 of this thread:

The insistence on making everything gain an effect level every +10 on the result means that you never leave the range where a +1 bonus has a large relative impact. By the time you're regular hitting on 10 numbers, you are critical hitting on 1 number. So while +1 doesn't add any damage output from your regular hits, it adds +100% to the output of your critical hits. And while a critical hit is less than 10 regular hits, it's a lot more than 1. Every bonus adds 1:1 to the chances of getting the highest tier possible result and removes 1:1 from the chances of getting the lowest tier possible result. If you hit on an 11+, you fumble on a 1 and critical on zero numbers, and if you add +1 to that you critical on a 20 and fumble on zero numbers. You've basically blanked out the number that made you stab yourself and replaced it with a number where you hit your opponent twice.

That paradigm means that every +1 is incredibly valuable. As much if not more so than it was in 4e. As such, expect the PF2 player community (to the extent that it exists) to be into micromanagement and bonus whoring to the same degree that the 4e community was.

Weird shit like Inspire Courage is going to stay on everyone's radar. And the only reason it won't become an assumed part of every party is if it turns out that there's something more efficient to do to give everyone stackable small bonuses.

-Username17

This has borne out. Getting a +1 is worth two or three times what it is in 3e (because it changes your success state on 2 numbers and every 10th bonus changes your success state on 3 numbers), and as such bonus-whoring is highly valuable regardless of whether success is likely, unlikely, or middling. Thus builds that leave two or three points of possible bonuses on the ground are laughably terrible. That's seriously like trying to make a strength 10 barbarian in 3e.

At the same time though, +1 still only literally reduces your fail chance by 5% even though it's worth more because it also increases your critical success chance by 5%. This means that literal failures are extremely common.

So they've basically figured out a new die rolling system that outputs the functions of 4th edition D&D that no one liked. You fail constantly at things you're supposed to be good at and you have to take "math fix feats" to keep your bonus whoring up to expectations. Again and still, this is what happens when people focus in on the parts and make a bunch of suggestions with no thought whatsoever as to what the overall game is going to be like.

-Username17

[Axebird]

Even Inspire Courage itself still plays into that, because Paizo just couldn't help themselves and it's still a party wide accuracy and damage buff that makes all the other combat music a bad idea.

The only cost effective ways to get status bonuses to hit are heroism (which climbs up to a +3 bonus to hit, saves, skills, and perception at level 17 and should probably be on everybody), Inspire Courage, and some weird-ass domain-specific spells you don't care about with short durations and inconvenient targeting. So have a bard or hump the cleric's leg, because clerics and bards are the only characters in the game that can cast heroism.

[magnuskn]

Also Sorcerers with the correct bloodlines.

[Yesterday's Hero]

I DMed on Saturday and I must say it was ok. It had all these problems you are mentioning, yes, but the combats felt faster than on PF1.

We played the ULTRA shitty AP, chapters 1 and 2. There was an ULTRA shitty skill challenge like... thing at the beginning that stretched out to 2 pages and was exceptionally hard to follow (if properly edited it would have fitted on half a page) and a long ass samey dungeon crawl that brought them to lvl 2, 2.3 and was supposed to conclude with a tense hostage negotiation but since they tackled the fort from another route they ended up doing second (out of 22 "rooms").

Pros: The 3 action economy is nice. In average sworders get an extra swing a level 1 which greatly speeds up play. There is a decent amount of wiggle room in classes, most get at least 2 interesting builds and that's about it.

Cons: Well, what everyone said already. It really did felt a lot like 4e IMO (albeit a much faster 4e). Competitive attack bonuses and defenses are really important because criticals will fucking wreck you, like frank and others said several times. Lots of shitty fiddly items (alchemical items don't deserve the distinction between regular consumables and all "talismans" are crap you are better off selling).

Conclusion: I think the predictions where pretty much spot on. My final verdict will come when I finally run a campaign created by me and see how well the system fits in with my style of DMing, but I pretty much have to wait for the Dungeon Master's Guide to do it since the game does not include NPC creation guidelines.

[Mord]

I pretty much have to wait for the Dungeon Master's Guide to do it since the game does not include NPC creation guidelines.

Wait wait wait. You're saying that the 640-goddamn-page shelfbreaker that is the PF2 book isn't even the complete game?

[Axebird]

I pretty much have to wait for the Dungeon Master's Guide to do it since the game does not include NPC creation guidelines.

Wait wait wait. You're saying that the 640-goddamn-page shelfbreaker that is the PF2 book isn't even the complete game?

There are no rules for modifying or creating monsters as promised in the Bestiary either. You pretty much can't run your own game right now, only the one AP.

[Ancient History]

I want to point out that at least Space Madness! includes guidelines for modifying enemies. Although having said that, I never specified how to make them weaker, although that should be kind of obvious.

[Username17]

I pretty much have to wait for the Dungeon Master's Guide to do it since the game does not include NPC creation guidelines.

Wait wait wait. You're saying that the 640-goddamn-page shelfbreaker that is the PF2 book isn't even the complete game?

They are replicating the success of 4th edition. Including the part where it's too verbose.

But the sprawling textual overflow is of course quite central to why the game isn't good and isn't ever going to be good. A design isn't finished when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away; but PF2 isn't designed at all. It is formed by accretion, by people simply making suggestions and then writing them into the heap.

It's not even that all of these suggestions are bad in a vacuum, it's that they are all made in a vacuum. None of these rules meaningfully interact with any other. They are each written stand alone, and then they interact with each other at all only because they must once read by the reader. The person trying to read this travesty attempts to impose some sort of order, to ignore the text that can't possibly fit and to mentally fill in holes that no rules text appears to have covered.

The human mind can run any RPG code no matter how sloppy, rambling, incomplete, or contradictory. It won't run it the same way twice, and it won't run it the same way as anyone else, but it will successfully run the code. PF2 puts that truism to the test; but despite being over half a million words of rambling, self contradictory, incomplete garbage, it can't actually cause the human mind to glitch out and give you a blue screen of death. But it does come close.

-Username17

[Kevin Mack]

Funnily enough Have a friend who's a big 4e fan who's read the pathfinder 2E rulebook and besides diffrent names about 50% of the rules are flat out things from 4E (Actually did a side by side showing to me with the books pointing each of the things out)

He's actually pretty annoyed since a lot of the things from 4e that people on the Paizo forums mocked are now flat out being praised and celebrated now there in Pathfinder 2E

[OgreBattle]

Funnily enough Have a friend who's a big 4e fan who's read the pathfinder 2E rulebook and besides diffrent names about 50% of the rules are flat out things from 4E (Actually did a side by side showing to me with the books pointing each of the things out)

He's actually pretty annoyed since a lot of the things from 4e that people on the Paizo forums mocked are now flat out being praised and celebrated now there in Pathfinder 2E

Yeah pathfinder had feats that gave you daily 'mundane powers, why CAN'T I just keep on doing it??'... but it was obfuscated under big piles of feats and 'optional class abilities'

I still don't have a clear idea of how Pathfinder 2e looks and plays though

[Yesterday's Hero]

There are no rules for modifying or creating monsters as promised in the Bestiary either. You pretty much can't run your own game right now, only the one AP.

The only thing you can do to enemies, as far as I know (having read both rule books and the AP) is to apply a sort of template that increases their level by one by giving them bigger numbers or apply said template pretty much in reverse to decrease their level by 1.

Before launch my group and I had the intention of playing a homebrew game, but when I realized that there were no rules for NPC creation I came to the realization that that is, of course, impossible in any meaningful way.

The DMG is announced for February, I think, while the APG (basically the player's guide 2) and the second Bestiary are announced for later next year.

I will say again, though, that the 3 action economy model works pretty well and that combats are quite fast.

I'll tell you more about the game as I keep playing.

[Emerald]

Funnily enough Have a friend who's a big 4e fan who's read the pathfinder 2E rulebook and besides diffrent names about 50% of the rules are flat out things from 4E (Actually did a side by side showing to me with the books pointing each of the things out)

He's actually pretty annoyed since a lot of the things from 4e that people on the Paizo forums mocked are now flat out being praised and celebrated now there in Pathfinder 2E

Any chance you could post some snippets and page references for that stuff? I have a friend in the hated-4e-praises-PF2 boat and it would be handy to be able to show him those references, 'cause I'm not about to buy the PF2 books and it's really hard to find anything in their terrible SRD.

[Username17]

The three action economy doesn't really solve any problems and doesn't scale. So I guess it's history lesson time.

Ultimately warriors in D&D have been getting extra attacks since the 1970s because even with belts of giant strength and vorpal blades the swinging of a sword does not keep up with dropping fireballs on groups of enemies. And in the days since 3rd edition launched, dropping fireballs wasn't even the third best thing that a mid level Wizard could do with their time. But of course, in a one-blow system, getting an extra attack is a really big deal, and so various attempts have been made to make the acquisition of new attacks gradual. In AD&D that was normally giving you extra attacks on some turns and not others and that was terrible. 3rd edition brought in the idea of getting extra attacks with a penalty to-hit, which was much more elegant.

The problem of course is that in 3rd edition, Fighters are not very good and get significantly worse as levels rise. The elegance of Full Attacking giving a second attack at -5 and a third attack at -10 is all fine and dandy, but it's also garbage. Offensive output that weak wouldn't be a big deal at first level, and as a reward for getting to 11th it's a sick joke.

So yes, you can just let people full attack like 6th level 3e characters at first level. And it's a modest but significant boost at that level. But you've still got the more fundamental problem that sword guys still need to do something at higher levels to keep up with the cloth wearers. And fucking around with the full attack rules just is not and cannot be the answer to that question.

Or to put it another way: If you looked at third edition and concluded that Barbarians needed a boost at levels 1-5 that degraded and was literally worth less than nothing by level 11 I just don't know what to say.

-Username17

[Yesterday's Hero]

The three action economy doesn't really solve any problems and doesn't scale. So I guess it's history lesson time.

Ok, well, I didn't say that it solved all the problems. I said that it worked pretty well.

The thing is that "Actions" is not the same as attacks. Actions can be any number of things. In fact, as you gain levels, you unlock better uses for your actions and you get to mix and match, therefore if the system is not shit the output you get from each action scales.

Action, lvl 1, CUT /You deal weapon damage
Action, lvl 4, DEEP CUT/You deal weapon damage and 1 bleed damage that stacks with itelf and forces concentration checks on spellcasters.

It of course is not the be all, end all of fantasy gaming.

And onto the accuracy bit: If your first attack has around 65% accuracy and your second attack has around 40% accuracy I wouldn't call that garbage. You can fuck up the execution, as you can fuck up everything, but in an of itself I wouldn't call that bad design. Especially since you can devote resources to that second attack, reducing the penalty for example.