Pathfinder 2e

[137beth]

It's pretty sketchy, but when you have a customer base so loyal that they'll gladly advance pre-order products that haven't even been announced yet, admit in droves that they haven't liked any of the releases for over a year, but still subscribe "to help the company", you need to milk that for all its worth. If people are willing to pay to suck your ****, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.

My favorite part of this whole process is watching how quickly some of the people who think everything Paizo does is right by virtue of it being Paizo have changed there tune on Pathfinder 2. There are people who, less than a week ago, were saying that anyone who so much as considers the possibility of a Pathfinder 2e is clearly an idiot, because the Holy Paizo Gods descended from Heaven and bequethed unto us mere mortals a Perfect Divine Game in the form of Pathfinder (1e).

Now? Many of those same people are applauding the announcement of Pathfinder 2, because Paizo announced it and so it must be good.

Hmm. The video seems to state that some version of the downtime rules system will be core. Hopefully that means they will integrate the craft system into it and fix the current ... issues.

This definitely makes me happy to hear. The Downtime system was by far my favorite thing Paizo produced (not counting stuff Paizo copied and pasted from non-Paizo products while adding more editing errors),

Nope


Yes.

Source: dev posts in a very long forum thread on Paizo.

Well that doesn't make me happy. While downtime is my favorite thing Paizo produced, my favorite thing that was actually in a Paizo product is the ability to build NPCs using the same rules as PCs. If that's gone, I'm not sure if there would be enough in the game to keep me interested.

[Lucas Yew]

Well that doesn't make me happy. While downtime is my favorite thing Paizo produced, my favorite thing that was actually in a Paizo product is the ability to build NPCs using the same rules as PCs. If that's gone, I'm not sure if there would be enough in the game to keep me interested.

Seconded. As they said on their Q&A that they now officially acknowledge LFQW and intend to fix it, my own litmus test for PF2 is mostly about PC-NPC transparency (which two other OGL games, 5E and Starfinder, failed badly).

Plus concrete DCs for skills (another major weakness of 5E, in my opinion), too.

[Cosi]

Seconded. As they said on their Q&A that they now officially acknowledge LFQW and intend to fix it, my own litmus test for PF2 is mostly about PC-NPC transparency (which two other OGL games, 5E and Starfinder, failed badly).

I really hope that with the increased focus on the different types of play: "Combat", "Exploration/Investigation", and "Downtime" that every character type has options for all three rather than it being "Martials get only combat", "Skill Monkeys get Combat and Exploration/Investigation", and "Spellcasters get all three".

The fundamental problem that D&D has is that Fighters and Wizards are playing different games. Not that Wizards are better than Fighters (although to be clear, that is true). That Wizards are different than Fighters. As a Wizard levels up, she gains access to new and subtle magics that allow her to overcome challenges that are entirely different from the ones she could defeat at low level, and to trivialize those low level challenges. As a Fighter levels up, he gets slightly bigger numbers on the abilities he had at first level. Consider what the Wizard gets at 9th level (teleport, lesser planar binding, fabricate) versus what the Fighter gets at 9th level (Weapon Training or Advanced Weapon Training). The Wizard gets abilities that allow her to take strategic-level actions that could alter the fate of an entire kingdom. The Fighter gets better at stabbing enemies he can personally reach.

Unless you fix that, your game isn't going to be good, and I see no sign Paizo has figured out how to fix that. They're not even shooting near the mark with suggestions like "maybe you could change the action economy" or "maybe people get to add half their level to things". The problem is that the game does not have a defined paradigm for play and advancement, and the solution to that problem is to define one. What is a 20th level adventure like? How is it different from a 12th level adventure? What challenges do 8th level characters need to be prepared for? What level is it appropriate to start flying around? How long should "the place you need to be is very far away" be a serious challenge?

Until the answers to those questions are set in stone, poking around with the action economy isn't going to do anything useful. It's just going to produce things like the 3e Monk.

Huh, if all crits do this, what separates longsword from battleaxe I wonder?

Who the hell cares? I can't wrap my head around a mindset where it is a problem that longswords are inferior to (or superior to) battleaxes. It's a weapon. If the most important thing about your weapon is whether it is an axe or a sword, that's a problem. The reason you care about a flaming sword is because it is flaming not because it is a sword.

I think there is a way to do "martial generalist" well. Fighter with no less than 4+Int, the Brawler's Martial Flexibility, and all the Advanced Weapon and Armor Training options baseline would be a good start that would still feel like a Fighter.

Maybe, but do we want to? Is it really a good thing to have a class whose defining feature is that there's nothing terribly special about it? D&D is a class-based system; that much is non-negotiable. So the system needs to leverage it, and a "martial generalist" class looks suspiciously like a point-buy system with extra steps.

There's no way to do "Fighter" well because "Fighter" is a stupid concept. The game is about going into dungeons and. well, fighting the inhabitants. You can't have a class that is defined by fighting, because fighting is a thing that everyone does. It's like an intrigue game with a Negotiator class. The Fighter class should be scrapped and replaced with classes with concepts that you might actually care about (like Champion or Warlord).

If PF 2e ends up like a more polished Starfinder, i'd be pretty happy. There's a lot to like about Starfinder, it's just a lot of the math simply didn't function as intended.

You mean Starfinder had good design goals? Because yes, most games do. The hard part of game design is producing a product where the math works and mechanics hit the targets you want, not standing those targets up in the first place.

[MeeposFire]

I'm not sure I agree. Yes, there's a part of that, but if that were all it took, a 2e spinoff would have sprung up to gobble up half or more of the D&D fanbase when 3e came out.

PF's success is due to the idea that "D&D needs to continue to be D&D," coupled with the fact that, for many, 4e no longer felt like D&D. A friend put it best, I think: "4e is a perfectly fine fantasy combat simulator that is almost, but not entirely, unlike D&D."

Were 4e more like 5e is, I suspect that PF never would have gained the ground it did.

Actually there are spin offs for about every version of D&D some of the big differences between here and now and back then have already been said (one of which is being able to directly use the D&D mechanics which no other retro clone has ever gotten to do) but one big one not said is that the differences between when 3e switched to 4e and all the editions and 3e was time. AD&D had relatively few changes between 1e and 2e and both of those were extremely similar in many ways to D&D which had been going on for well over 20+ years when 3e came out. D&D was in trouble at the time because it was the the stale RPG system on the market, still the most well known, but very stale. 3e felt like a big change at that point and one that was felt to be LONG overdue. Contrast that to when 4e came out and even before you know anything about the mechanics (just to keep the arguments over edition wars out of this) you had plenty of people saying they were not ready or a change because it had not been that long, relative to what D&D at that point was used to, between the last change and 4e.

The market was begging for change when 3e came out it was more wait and see when 4e came out.

So... how different is 2e looking from 1e right now?
Is it just a 3.0e to 3.5e dnd level of changes? Or bigger differences?

On the whole more 3.0 to 3.5 than say 2e-3e, 3e-4e, or 4e-5e. They are similar enough that I have played 1e characters in 2e adventures and vice versa. The same is mostly true for older D&D (Rulescyclopedia type) where once I DMed a whole D&D adventure for a group playing 2e AD&D and did not know it until years later when I got the RUlescyclopedia and little things like "class: elf" all of a sudden made sense (at the time I thought they were short handing something in a monster manual I did not own and I also thought that they were just simplifying the stat block for fighter/mage and that every elf just happened to be one). Suffice to say from the start of D&D until 3e the differences are there but you easily mix and match stuff from each with a little bit of homebrew (and sometimes none at all).

If the fan reaction of Pathfinder Players was enough to "Stop" it it would also be enough for them not to need something like this in the first place.

Yeah what is hard to get across sometimes is that if you only keep tweaking the game you will keep the hard core fans but you will keep losing people slowly due to people losing interest and it will become harder and harder to attract new people. WotC saw that when they bought TSR which is one reason why 3e is quite a bit different from previous editions and that created some excitement. Yes they do risk losing that hard core base (which I admit for PF is a big risk considering its history and I do think just dismissing that concern is a mistake because even here you have PF fans making snide comments about what they think of Paizo's design chops so if they do not trust them to really design stuff that is going to make this even harder) but if they do not do something they will commit to the long loss of market share and importance. Long running game companies know this you must inovate or lose (though the tricky part with these kind of games is innovating enough to keep things fresh while keeping as much of the older fans as possible).

[Milo v3]

Until the answers to those questions are set in stone, poking around with the action economy isn't going to do anything useful. It's just going to produce things like the 3e Monk.

I don't know why you quoted me on that reply considering I wasn't talking about action economy or combat changes and was specifically saying how non-casters need things to do in the 3 out of 3 different phases of the game rather than only being combat related.... I'm specifically saying they need out of combat utility abilities, especially when the game is going out of it's way to have separate mechanical phases for "Combat"/"Exploration"/"Downtime".

[Cosi]

I don't know why you quoted me on that reply considering I wasn't talking about action economy or combat changes and was specifically saying how non-casters need things to do in the 3 out of 3 different phases of the game rather than only being combat related.... I'm specifically saying they need out of combat utility abilities, especially when the game is going out of it's way to have separate mechanical phases for "Combat"/"Exploration"/"Downtime".

I quoted you because you were on the thread of conversation I was commenting on. I didn't quote someone talking about action economy because I think that line of conversation is stupid and unhelpful and my point was about why it's stupid and unhelpful.

[Rynjin]

Well let's face it, shields are almost completely irrelevant and a poor build choice in all of 2E, 3E, 4E, PF, and 5E; so anything P2 does to make them more interesting is welcome.

?

Sword and board is probably the best TWFing style (which makes it about the 3rd best fighting style after 2H weapons and archery; 4th if you count Board and Board) in Pathfinder.

[CharonsHelper]

?

Sword and board is probably the best TWFing style (which makes it about the 3rd best fighting style after 2H weapons and archery; 4th if you count Board and Board) in Pathfinder.

Not to mention being great for all of the secondary combatants. (Clerics/bards/inquisitors etc.)

But really - at high levels when PA isn't very good anymore (through a combination of how much other static damage you get and your 2nd & 3rd iterative attacks) two-handed combat isn't all that great by then, while +6-7 AC can be very nice.

[Slithery D]

As far as sword vs. battleaxe, I think I saw a claim that some weapons will have an agile quality that gives them less of a penalty on iterative attacks. So a dagger might be 0/-2/-4 if you triple attack, a greatsword the standard 0/-5/-10. If that's so, other weapons could have values in the middle.

[Morphic tide]

Honestly, thinking back on things, I'm wanting more old school mechanics brought in, like how Archetypes are a recreation of Kits. Spells having multiple list types for different casting organizations, letting Wizard and Sorcerer be more different due to the shared list being accessed in different ways. Spell Schools being an academic and methodological categorization, while Spheres (the 2e Cleric/Druid kind) are a thematic or tradition based listing method. Thus Necromancy is turned into a Sphere of magic from a School, as the spells in it are linked thematically rather than mechanically. Fear effects return to being all-Enchantment, but the "taboo" retains mechanical representation by way of a spell categorization that specifically covers the taboo of "dark" magic as it relates to death.

Making Ranger, Paladin and Fighter properly distinct has been mentioned as a problem already, and I'm excited for the possibility of Iron Magic making it into core as Fighter's "thing" for utility effects. Drawing on the magical properties of your items, even if they aren't actively magically enhanced, could give Fighter the leg up it needs to make it to t3, or borderline t4. Ranger being made more distinct from Fighter to give room for skilled Fighters starts with killing utility niche protection as a concept. As such, the Rogue's skillmonkey position comes more from extra bonus to skills than being the only one who has decent skill capacity of the relevant kind, much like how Starfinder handled it.

[Togath]

On the whole more 3.0 to 3.5 than say 2e-3e, 3e-4e, or 4e-5e. They are similar enough that I have played 1e characters in 2e adventures and vice versa. The same is mostly true for older D&D (Rulescyclopedia type) where once I DMed a whole D&D adventure for a group playing 2e AD&D and did not know it until years later when I got the RUlescyclopedia and little things like "class: elf" all of a sudden made sense (at the time I thought they were short handing something in a monster manual I did not own and I also thought that they were just simplifying the stat block for fighter/mage and that every elf just happened to be one). Suffice to say from the start of D&D until 3e the differences are there but you easily mix and match stuff from each with a little bit of homebrew (and sometimes none at all).

Err, I probably should've been clearer, I meant the differences between 1e Pathfinder and 2e Pathfinder.

[MeeposFire]

?

Sword and board is probably the best TWFing style (which makes it about the 3rd best fighting style after 2H weapons and archery; 4th if you count Board and Board) in Pathfinder.

I was thinking about saying how in 2e, 4e, and certainly 5e sword and board was pretty good to great but I thought it would potentially grind the thread to a halt on something not really important so I actually deleted the whole thing.

Suffice to say though while I think in those editions it could be good I would not say they are dynamic in any way.

[atemu1234]

The fundamental problem that D&D has is that Fighters and Wizards are playing different games..

Fighters are playing Dark Souls, while Wizards are playing Skyrim. Basically, for a fighter, death is a reasonable expectation of an on-level encounter, moreso than a wizard, who can choose to flee if need be.

[MeeposFire]

Meh the dynamic between warrior types and caster types was always the most strained in 3e type games. The many small changes made from AD&D to 3e made magic easier to use, less restricted, and gave casters more endurance while the warrior types were made on the whole weaker and less able to do their jobs. One of the biggest problems is the action economy so I wholeheartedly disagree with those who say that fixing the action economy for warriors is not important it is one of the most important changes needed in the game.

Consider that 3e is the only edition where a warrior cannot move (at least half as rounds speed) and make his normal number of attacks. It makes a big difference if you play somebody with a weapon and you no longer have to play the game of "how can I make sure I can get full attacks without getting screwed over by simple tactics".

[Eldariel]

Meh the dynamic between warrior types and caster types was always the most strained in 3e type games. The many small changes made from AD&D to 3e made magic easier to use, less restricted, and gave casters more endurance while the warrior types were made on the whole weaker and less able to do their jobs. One of the biggest problems is the action economy so I wholeheartedly disagree with those who say that fixing the action economy for warriors is not important it is one of the most important changes needed in the game.

Consider that 3e is the only edition where a warrior cannot move (at least half as rounds speed) and make his normal number of attacks. It makes a big difference if you play somebody with a weapon and you no longer have to play the game of "how can I make sure I can get full attacks without getting screwed over by simple tactics".

It also leads to the bizarre and unintuitive situations where it's optimal to take a move action and eat up attack of opportunity and let the opponent move and attack instead of full attacking. In practice that would mean you're neck to neck with the enemy attacking you and you ignoring it at all times but somehow the enemy is less able to hurt you this way than while you're defending yourself. It also ****s up class balance some more; casters can move and get 100% efficiency, why can't mundanes? It should be the other way around since caster actions are more powerful IMHO. This way casters would actually benefit of a mundane protecting them while they do their reality boning thing (and gishes would have an edge over straight casters in better being able to use their magic in combat and being able to defend themselves even when enemy closes in; you don't see Gandalf using magic when in melee either). Reality boning is still more powerful but at least mundanes would have a role in enabling it to a degree.

Casters should have 1 round casting times by default with only particular interrupt/fast free spells as 1 standard action or faster and mundanes should be able to do their thing as a standard action while moving (and ready move actions to follow/block enemies to do away with the ridiculous "walk past the guy with the sword because he's frozen while I move"-mechanic), and since they focus on physical development and reactions, one of the most logical and powerful things to give warriors as they level up would be extra actions in a turn. This would also give warrior/caster multiclass builds some actual benefits compared to casters for taking warrior levels; lightning-fast movements and reflexes allow them to act more efficiently and thus take more immediate/swift/standard/move actions each turn.

[Yondu]

It also leads to the bizarre and unintuitive situations where it's optimal to take a move action and eat up attack of opportunity and let the opponent move and attack instead of full attacking. In practice that would mean you're neck to neck with the enemy attacking you and you ignoring it at all times but somehow the enemy is less able to hurt you this way than while you're defending yourself. It also ****s up class balance some more; casters can move and get 100% efficiency, why can't mundanes? It should be the other way around since caster actions are more powerful IMHO. This way casters would actually benefit of a mundane protecting them while they do their reality boning thing (and gishes would have an edge over straight casters in better being able to use their magic in combat and being able to defend themselves even when enemy closes in; you don't see Gandalf using magic when in melee either). Reality boning is still more powerful but at least mundanes would have a role in enabling it to a degree.

Casters should have 1 round casting times by default with only particular interrupt/fast free spells as 1 standard action or faster and mundanes should be able to do their thing as a standard action while moving (and ready move actions to follow/block enemies to do away with the ridiculous "walk past the guy with the sword because he's frozen while I move"-mechanic), and since they focus on physical development and reactions, one of the most logical and powerful things to give warriors as they level up would be extra actions in a turn. This would also give warrior/caster multiclass builds some actual benefits compared to casters for taking warrior levels; lightning-fast movements and reflexes allow them to act more efficiently and thus take more immediate/swift/standard/move actions each turn.

You point the real issue here, the action economy, because not only it impede the melee character to act as it should do, it overly advantage the caster by making them more mobile...
I've tryed to implement the full round casting time for casters, I does not work very well because it implies a lot of rework especially if the caster rely on invocations (that are clearly OP on my point of view), maybe a complex action to cast a spell is more viable... also, the fact that some spells are non-defendable by the target is also an issue, Mundanes does not have this possibility.
A big issue for me was also the initiative system in D20, whenever you cast a groundbreakin' spell, swing a enormous sword or flashing a rapier, you act at the same moment, without penalties or slowing.... PF bring a lot in the D20 game especially for the non-caster ( a lot of new options, possibilities ...), I recognize it, but the legacy of D&D 3.x is a heavy weight.

[MeeposFire]

You point the real issue here, the action economy, because not only it impede the melee character to act as it should do, it overly advantage the caster by making them more mobile...
I've tryed to implement the full round casting time for casters, I does not work very well because it implies a lot of rework especially if the caster rely on invocations (that are clearly OP on my point of view), maybe a complex action to cast a spell is more viable... also, the fact that some spells are non-defendable by the target is also an issue, Mundanes does not have this possibility.
A big issue for me was also the initiative system in D20, whenever you cast a groundbreakin' spell, swing a enormous sword or flashing a rapier, you act at the same moment, without penalties or slowing.... PF bring a lot in the D20 game especially for the non-caster ( a lot of new options, possibilities ...), I recognize it, but the legacy of D&D 3.x is a heavy weight.

Casters being unable to move on a round they cast actually used to be a rule in various forms of older D&D and that did affect them quite a bit and that was one of the many minor seeming changes from AD&D 2e and 3e that actually affects more than they thought.

If doing a 3e game and you do want to bring that back to a degree you could make it the full attack action for many spells which allows you to still use swift actions and allow spell affects to actually take affect the round you cast.

The one big exception I would make would be damage dealing spells. Keep those as standard actions and it makes those spells slightly better to the competition.

[Cosi]

As far as sword vs. battleaxe, I think I saw a claim that some weapons will have an agile quality that gives them less of a penalty on iterative attacks. So a dagger might be 0/-2/-4 if you triple attack, a greatsword the standard 0/-5/-10. If that's so, other weapons could have values in the middle.

Why. Why would you want to track that. Why would you want to require me to recheck a character's attack bonuses every time they pick up another weapon. Just let axes be better than swords. Or use the old crit mechanics, which were fine.

Fighters are playing Dark Souls, while Wizards are playing Skyrim. Basically, for a fighter, death is a reasonable expectation of an on-level encounter, moreso than a wizard, who can choose to flee if need be.

No. The problem isn't that the Fighter loses a lot in combat (I mean, that is a problem, but it's not the hard problem). To use your analogy the problem isn't that the Fighter is playing Dark Souls while the Wizard is playing Skyrim. It's that the Fighter is playing Dark Souls while the Wizard is playing Dominions. If the Wizard is still getting planar binding while the Fighter is getting Advanced Weapon Training, the game is broken even if the Fighter is good enough at stabbing individual enemies they can personally reach.

Casters should have 1 round casting times by default with only particular interrupt/fast free spells as 1 standard action or faster and mundanes should be able to do their thing as a standard action while moving (and ready move actions to follow/block enemies to do away with the ridiculous "walk past the guy with the sword because he's frozen while I move"-mechanic), and since they focus on physical development and reactions, one of the most logical and powerful things to give warriors as they level up would be extra actions in a turn. This would also give warrior/caster multiclass builds some actual benefits compared to casters for taking warrior levels; lightning-fast movements and reflexes allow them to act more efficiently and thus take more immediate/swift/standard/move actions each turn.

I agree that spells and attacks should be the same action, but I think that action type should obviously be standard, because if you are going to go to the effort of having a tactical grid with terrain effects on individual squares, you should obviously be having people move around.

Also, doing anything "because it would make multiclass builds good" is dead in the water because open multiclassing doesn't work and isn't necessary.

[CharonsHelper]

Casters being unable to move on a round they cast actually used to be a rule in various forms of older D&D and that did affect them quite a bit and that was one of the many minor seeming changes from AD&D 2e and 3e that actually affects more than they thought.

If doing a 3e game and you do want to bring that back to a degree you could make it the full attack action for many spells which allows you to still use swift actions and allow spell affects to actually take affect the round you cast.

The one big exception I would make would be damage dealing spells. Keep those as standard actions and it makes those spells slightly better to the competition.

I think that the action length of spells should just vary a lot more. It's a balancing/variety factor which is surprisingly underused.

You could easily have a 3rd, 5th, & 7th level spells do very similar things, but if the 3rd level one is a full round action while the 5th level spell is a standard action, and the 7th level is a swift action, they might all be worth taking. (Especially if they cut back on the quadratic wizard - which both Starfinder & the teasers of PF2e seem to imply is a goal.)

But yes - I do agree that the default should be that a spell is either a full attack or maybe even a full round.

[Cosi]

Having your prize for hitting 13th level be "you can do that thing you could do at 5th level, but three times a round" sounds like the stupidest design decision I can imagine. As a result, I assume it will be exactly what the designers choose to do for PF 2e.

[CharonsHelper]

Having your prize for hitting 13th level be "you can do that thing you could do at 5th level, but three times a round" sounds like the stupidest design decision I can imagine. As a result, I assume it will be exactly what the designers choose to do for PF 2e.

Considering that your idea of good balance for a wizard being 10x more powerful than everyone else - I'm taking that with a big grain of salt.

It would give them tactical options. And if single spells aren't enough to win fights (they shouldn't be) then they would be able to throw out combinations in a single round.

And I didn't say that should be all 7th level spells are. You would of course be able to take more powerful spells which take longer to cast than a swift action.

Heck - in Pathfinder adding Quicken metamagic to a spell already adds +4 to the spell level, and that's only from standard to swift. (which is what I ball-parked the difference off of - though I'm just spit-balling)

Plus - I'm going to guess that they're flattening character progression a bit.

[Cosi]

Considering that your idea of good balance for a wizard being 10x more powerful than everyone else - I'm taking that with a big grain of salt.

No, that is wrong. That is obviously wrong, and I have called it out as wrong and explained why it is wrong every time someone has said it. But people keep saying it. I assume this is because people don't understand what "balance point" actually means.

I believe that the Wizard is (closer to) an appropriate balance point than the Fighter. That means that everyone should be at the power level the Wizard is at (give or take things like planar binding or polymorph cheese).

Do you see the difference between that and "the Wizard should be 10x more powerful than everyone else"?

[Morphic tide]

No, that is wrong. That is obviously wrong, and I have called it out as wrong and explained why it is wrong every time someone has said it. But people keep saying it. I assume this is because people don't understand what "balance point" actually means.

I believe that the Wizard is (closer to) an appropriate balance point than the Fighter. That means that everyone should be at the power level the Wizard is at (give or take things like planar binding or polymorph cheese).

Do you see the difference between that and "the Wizard should be 10x more powerful than everyone else"?

It's probably that you've opposed the measures needed to bring other classes up to the Wizard's level (weren't you one of those Guy At The Gym fallacy people in the Fighter-boosting discussion threads?), while also being extremely opposed to any serious nerfing of the fundamentally problematic spellcasters.

[Rhedyn]

I doubt Paizo can get good feedback. The moderation on their forums is anti-negativity and let's anyone who is positive be as hateful to decenters as they want. neogaf-lite

The forum is basically ran by concern trolls who found out that they can just whine about tone to get a mod to win the argument for them.

It's like most of the posters are made of glass and can only handle criticism if it's phrased like a compliment.

[Cosi]

(weren't you one of those Guy At The Gym fallacy people in the Fighter-boosting discussion threads?),

Again, misrepresenting my position. I think that "mundane dude" is never going to be equal to "magic dude" at high levels, because "mundane dude" is a concept defined by what it can't do (anything magical) and "magic dude" is a concept defined by what it can do (magic). As a result, for Fighters to not suck at high (power) levels they need to get magic, either as a result of pivoting from classes like Fighter to classes like Champion or as a result of forcing people to PrC or both.

while also being extremely opposed to any serious nerfing of the fundamentally problematic spellcasters.

There aren't any fundamentally problematic spellcasters. There are like three kinds of abilities that need nerfs from power perspectives (minionmancy, polymorphing, action economy manipulation)*, maybe that many that could go down for complexity reasons (spells that cite to other spells, polymorph again), and some non-balance arguments for structuring casters differently (people like thematic casters, so we should make casters more thematically focused).

*: And even these are implementation issues. Ironically the most problematic one from a design perspective is probably action economy manipulating abilities.

[Morty]

Here is a bunch of information. It appears that the gap between casters and non-casters is still there and still intentional... just not as drastic. Good to have that cleared up.

They're keeping the old 11 classes because "people would freak out without them" and "it's never a good idea to take things from them". That... really tells me volumes about their priorities. I'm really not sure how having a list of 12 classes that doesn't exactly line up with what PF 1E had is taking anything away, but... okay.

[stack]

A podcast interview apparently states that spells won't auto-scale, instead they have to be upcast like in 5E. thread

Well, I can't agree to that decision.

[CharonsHelper]

They're keeping the old 11 classes because "people would freak out without them" and "it's never a good idea to take things from them". That... really tells me volumes about their priorities. I'm really not sure how having a list of 12 classes that doesn't exactly line up with what PF 1E had is taking anything away, but... okay.

To not lose their customers and hopefully sell more books? Shocking priorities for a business.

[Eldariel]

I agree that spells and attacks should be the same action, but I think that action type should obviously be standard, because if you are going to go to the effort of having a tactical grid with terrain effects on individual squares, you should obviously be having people move around.

Also, doing anything "because it would make multiclass builds good" is dead in the water because open multiclassing doesn't work and isn't necessary.

I think spells should keep variable actions to maintain another balancing angle but the vast majority should trend towards 1 round to make the "Protect the caster who does big boom"-minigame relevant and to enable casters to have more powerful effects with relevant but manageable costs.


The latter...eh, you couls make it work if you wanted. AD&D Human Dual Classing was fine if not consistent powerwise (very low initial power but considerable payoffs). There are many angles even in 3.5 (Ardent, ToB) that enable it let alone all the infinite unexplored options.

Yeah, not necessary, but basically the ultimate in terms of character creation freedom in a classbased system.

[Cosi]

I think that in terms of classes the only thing that really matters is the number (and concept coverage). People were pissed off that 4e went from 11 classes in the PHB to 8. They didn't seem terribly upset about replacing the Sorcerer with the Warlock.

The fact that Paizo is still embracing intentional imbalance is disappointing, but not surprising. Honestly, none of the stuff they've announced really seems to merit an edition change. They're adjusting power levels slightly, and making the Alchemist more important. Couldn't you accomplish that by printing some power-creep options and producing more content aimed at Alchemists?