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Pathfinder Second Edition

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Pathfinder Second Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 09 Sep 2020 07:48

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http://rollforinitiative.blogspot.com/2 ... ition.html

Obiri wrote:Pathfinder Second Edition

I was initially a bit disappointed to hear of the second edition. But after some thought I realized that Pathfinder 1 has some issues and maybe a new version could fix them up. After all in some ways Starfinder has made improvements over Pathfinder so it would just be a matter of finding the sweet spot between the two.

If you had asked me a month ago what I didn't like about Pathfinder my list would look something like this:

1. Christmas Tree Effect: Most classes need magic items to be effective. This is especially notable in that usually these items are usually the same for everybody. Cloak of resistance, Belt of physical stats, Headband of mental stats, ring of protection, amulet of natural armor and apparently a 6th item I'm forgetting.

2. After level 10 you are pretty much guaranteed success or failure. Pathfinder rewards specialization so you are either so good at a task you don't fail or the DC is so high you'd never bother to attempt it.

There are a few more but these are the big ones.

Starfinder does a pretty good job tackling my first issue. Stat booster items are rare and strictly limited. Most magic or tech items give you an ability you didn't have before and might let you do something cool like fly temporarily, or get a breath weapon. Power level of these items seems appropriate. Stat items are not needed because of the healthy increases every 5 levels.

Pathfinder 2E takes this limiting to a whole new level by introducing resonance. Each magical item usage costs resonance points on a per use or daily basis. I'm not really sure what problem this is trying to solve. CLW wands allow parties without a healer to function in 1E. Starfinder takes care of this issue with the Stamina/Rest system. 2E just nerfs healing altogether. Unless you have a cleric that wants to only use healing spells get used to having a short adventuring day. It seems like really poor game design to me and huge step backwards from everything they've done before. Not everyone should need a healbot in their party. It sucks when that healbot is you.

After seeing 2E's solution to point 2, I'm not so sure if it's a problem worth solving. In 2E optimizing really doesn't seem possible with the Beta rules. Your rates of success are always relatively fixed. There's really no sense of progression. You hit 50% of the time at level 1 and 50% of the time at level 20. The flip side of this is that even things you've never invested in at all you still have a 30% success rate.

For me part of the fun of 1E was coming up with a character concept and then digging through the myriad of splat books trying to find the right combination of options and bonuses to make it work. In 2E you can't do this. The classes are all very rigid and any sort of bonus is very rare and often limited to obscure situations.

A lot of the class options seem to fall into this area. You get a +1 bonus when performing this rarely used skill on the third full moon of the year. I think overall the power level of 2E is much lower than 1E. Most class options felt underpowered, rarely useful, or just bland and boring.

And why is everything a Feat?

Goblins as a player race? Really? Goblins, that eat dogs and children. Goblins that think written words are evil. How do they get a +2 to charisma? They are stupid little anarchist devils.

It's not all bad. I like the new action system. Bards, rogues and fighters all seem pretty good. The cleric seems like the strongest overall (probably to entice people to actually want to play a healer). The ranger options and weak and limited. Why anyone would play one is beyond me. So far they are this edition's Rogue. Paladin is pretty bad too. Alchemist is unplayable until they fix resonance. I haven't really looked at the druid. Barbarian seems ok but many of its options fall into the useless/corner case/boring categories. And Superstition, wtf were they thinking there? Being unable to use magic in exchange for a tiny bonus? The same applied in 1E but only when raging and the bonuses were good enough to make it worth the risk. This is just a terrible waste of page space.

Sadly that's what a lot of the options seem to be to me. A waste of page space. I seriously wonder if you took a level 10 character with no class feats (/ugh, shiver) and compared them to level 10 character with class feats and see the difference in performance. I think it would be very small.

Starfinder has straightjacket classes as well but at least the options are varied, useful and interesting. When you look at all of the available options and don't like any of them, the game has a serious problem.

For Paizo's sake I hope they turn things around. They've done good things in the past so I have some faith that they'll turn things around. But from looking at the the design choices so far it looks like they are trying to build a game I have no interest in playing. Which isn't so bad. I still have lots of unused character ideas for 1E and as more things get added to Starfinder hopefully I'll find that system as enjoyable as some people in my gaming group already do.


Note that we're not going to be playing the above system now. The PF group will be playing PF 1E. Also note that this guy's favorite system is 3.0/3.5/PF1 (they are almost the same thing). That he criticizes these systems doesn't mean that they are bad, it's just that they are super-complex, so of course there are areas where they could be improved.

It's a great blog, I've spent hours reading it and will be posting more from it soon. Too bad they haven't updated in two years (it's several authors).
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Re: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 20 Apr 2022 01:43

https://twitter.com/macarthur_dd8/statu ... 7135685632

MacArthur ⩔ deadly d8 @macarthur_dd8 wrote:Check out this FANTASTIC Pathfinder 2e Class Guide made by u/PathfinderInfo on reddit. I'm a real nerd for stuff like this- love me some information visualization. @paizo


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The image is 8K. It'll be perfect for the overworld wiki. Would be cool if they also made a PF1 one.

Stuff like this makes the game so much easier to grasp. Without the grappling flowcharts we would not have been able to run the couple of grappling moves we've run so far. We need as many diagrams and flowcharts as we can get.

Check how on top of arcane and divine magic, it also lists occult and primal. I think those also exist in PF1 and can be unlocked via the "Occult Adventures" rulebook etc.
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Re: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jul 2022 04:29

https://twitter.com/BatCalledKat/status ... 0573987840

Kat | @BatCalledKat wrote:Leshies as Pathfinder Classes compilation
I already miss working on them, excited for Paizo to release new classes~

Who's your favorite?

#pathfinder2e #dndart


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Re: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 03 May 2023 23:21

State of PF2e: 4 years into the game; I tried to summarize which PF1e classes were available in the newer system
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... i_tried_to

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Some people have offered corrections/improvements in the comments, and the OP said he'll make an updated image in a few days.
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Re: Pathfinder Second Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 25 Jan 2024 14:22

Thread is full of spoilers, just read what I am giving you: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43v5l?So-w ... d-stuff#26

Steel_Wind wrote:As for freelancer writers on whom so much depends – the best Freelance adventure authors have almost entirely sat out writing any adventures for PF2. There are a number of good reasons for this, but the end result is a perceptible decrease in the quality of the overall product. Yes, this is, in my view, plain and obvious.

Paizo has also shied away from the world-shaking AP themes of the past with the APs it has published in the PF2 era. There were, initially at least, good reasons for them to do this. But as time has worn on, that lack of “epic” in terms of flavor to the AP line has been conspicuously absent. Quality of themes have suffered as a result. Too much travelogue and niche filling – not enough “epic”.

And that’s before we talk about the complete disruption within Paizo’s staff in the AP line over the past 7 years or so – which has taken its toll on the product line.

Add all of that together: Developer, Theme, and Freelance writers – and that’s why you get a top Adventure Path List that would exclude every single one of the Adv Paths written for PF2 so far, imo.

That doesn’t mean they are all bad. Volume 1 of AV, for example, is a top-shelf product (but the magic of Vol 1 doesn’t persist into Vol 2, does it? Be fair.) Overall, the three volumes of AV still would slot in in the middle third, not within the top shelf of PF1’s offerings.

All of this is a problem for the current product line. I hope John Compton gets it right and that he is given adequate time to find his feet and make his mark on “Pathfinder: Adventure Path” – which is still the single greatest RPG adventure publication of all time.


John Compton is the current head developer of the "Pathfinder: Adventure Path" line, it's no longer James Jacobs since he was promoted to overall Creative Director for Pathfinder. That's one of the reasons the AP quality has taken a hit, and that's why this forum member is lauding JJ in that other quote I pulled in the JJ thread just now (both quotes are from the same post): https://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=39260#p39260

So he's saying that JJ's promotion and his replacement MATTER. And then he continues to pile on reasons on top of that on why the APs have declined.

There's no doubt Paizo is on the decline, but that decline started at the highest peak of roleplaying (and therefore of gaming), so the stuff they put out now is still good, just not great.

The good news for players of Battlegrounds is that they're playing the peak and that, by the time they get to the contemporary stuff, the Paizo forums will be full of suggestions on how to improve it, which I will study and implement.

And let me just repeat that the worst Paizo adventure ever written is still better than the best CRPG that has ever been made. The differences that guy is talking about are Lambo versus Ferrari versus Porsche. CRPGs are Skodas in that ranking. Anyone coming from THAT world should be in heaven no matter what AP or standalone adventure they end up playing.
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Re: Pathfinder Second Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 25 Jan 2024 14:52

I suspect much of the problem has to do with "diversity". There is a LOT of it in Paizo right now. blacks, browns, yellows are writing for Paizo now, and these people can't do "epic"; they can barely write as it is. That's why there's little epic in PF2 APs, and what little there is comes from Whites, I have no doubt. The non-Whites just aren't ambitious enough for the "world-shaking" events that built Pathfinder and the AP line.

Also homos and trannies. Paizo is full of them too now, and they can't do epic either. They just do little weird niche themes, exactly what the forum member is decrying.

This is what I posted in the thread (don't visit, thread full of spoilers): https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43v5l&page ... d-stuff#81

I wrote:The epic as a literary genre, and even more a gaming genre, was invented and perfected by a very specific type of people. When these people are lacking, the epic disappears with them.

I can't say more cause I'd be banned.
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