Pathfinder 2e

[Whipstitch]

I think you have 4E Shadowrun and that's it.

Yeah, I'd argue that SR4 is sort of an exception that proves the rule; you can reduce the hostility and friction to a low simmer IF everyone acknowledges that one of our tentpole mechanics (the matrix) just plain doesn't work, the timeline has an editorial mandate to always move forward AND one of your genre's central conceits is "the future is a foreign country." Even then there were Shadowrun fans who weren't thrilled about the move to SR4 and who felt that franchise was losing too much of its flavor. If the corebook had been a definitive step backwards I guarantee you the knives would have come out, because the SR5 book mostly resulted in people getting super pissed.

[Suzerain]

There's no mass positive sentiment behind PF2 anywhere I've seen. There are small, insular circlejerks - on the Paizo forums or the dedicated subreddit for example - but anywhere that is more general RPG discussion tends to either ignore it or outright trash it.

Where there is discussion, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance, failure to understand, and failure to honestly engage with the faults of the system on the side of it's supporters. This is particularly apparent with comparisons to PF1, where they'll often claim you can do more in PF2 despite every single choice available to you being less impactful in game than taking Combat Reflexes.

[OgreBattle]

Weapons in PF2e often have traits that modify follow up attacks, that's neat:
https://2e.aonprd.com/Weapons.aspx

Like...
Forceful (falchion) + damage
Backswing (Nunchucks) + accuracy if first attack missed
Sweep (Scimitar) + accuracy on different target

The modifiers are pretty small though and follow up attacks are usually -5 -10

[saithorthepyro]

Weapons in PF2e often have traits that modify follow up attacks, that's neat:
https://2e.aonprd.com/Weapons.aspx

Like...
Forceful (falchion) + damage
Backswing (Nunchucks) + accuracy if first attack missed
Sweep (Scimitar) + accuracy on different target

The modifiers are pretty small though and follow up attacks are usually -5 -10

Fair few people are actually not a fan, as for them it seems extra fiddliness in combat that was not needed and is really so minor to not really be noticeable. I’m neutral in this particular case, but I can see where they are coming from.

[Username17]

Factually, SR4 came with a giant flame war that dragged on for about a year. Grognards were upset about variable target numbers, upset about samey magical traditions, upset about wireless internet. The editionwar was big and nearly tore dumpshock in half.

-Username17

[souran]

Yeah was something I noticed as well for 2E there was hardly any activity about it on any websites I go to either praising or bashing was at best big old load of meh.

Also if there relying on the AP's to keep them afloat then there in trouble cause the new one as said is really kinda shit (and I say this as someone who owns all the Ap's) Possibly the worse one I've ever seen.

This is exactly the sentiment I was seeing. People don't care, and the thing that people on Paizo sites are always talking about (the APs) are mostly filled with "the 2E path has a crap story" but even then nobody gives a crap about the underling game.....

I am wondering how long it is before we see Paizo APs written with dual stats for 5e.

[Orca]

PF2 has sucked the life from PF1; there's no sign that anyone else can breathe life back into it. It doesn't look like PF2 has got enough fans from that to grow on its own, more must have scattered to other RPGs or just gone quiet on the internet.

Running with dual stats for D&D 5e does look like the best medium term plan for Paizo though I don't expect to see that for a year or so yet. Not until they've got a full year's data on how well (or not) sales are going for PF2.

[Username17]

5e D&D assumes you played enough 3.x D&D to just use the stealth rules from that game from memory because it has function calls to rules that only exist in earlier editions. PF2E rewrote the stealth system so that stealth doesn't work.

The issue of course is that writing RPG procedures is actually really difficult. Making a procedure that both covers all potential eventualities and be simple enough to actual use late at night while drunk.

Stealth in particular is RPG writing on super hard mode, and like "social systems" it has broken the minds and backs of some of the greatest RPG writers in the business. The Stealth minigame is one where it is possible for there to be more than two relevant parties and also that participants can start at different levels of knowledge of the others' existence and that it can be important or unimportant when exactly those knowledge levels change. Consider some simple examples:

• Museum Guard vs Thief. The Thief is attempting to prevent the guard from knowing that they are or have ever been in the museum. If the Guard realizes that anyone is or has been in the room after closing hours, the alarm is raised.
• Scouting the Guard Post. The Scout is aware that there are Guards in the guard post and the Guards are initially unaware that there is a Scout. The Scout is attempting to find out how many Guards are in the post without alerting any of them that there is a Scout doing anything.
• Two War Parties in the Woods. Neither team is aware of the other to begin with, and whichever team notices that they have company first has a significant advantage which they can blow if their prepared ambush is noted by the other team before the combat music starts.

All of these are important to model and also you can recall analogous events to all three of those happening in the Lord of the Rings. So it's absolutely fundamental as to source material in addition to common sense.

Meanwhile, a simple "everyone makes a spot check for every enemy" is fifty rolls for a simple five on five warparties in the woods scenario and is obviously nonfunctional. Similarly, asking for die rolls and positioning declarations at all in a situation where the players aren't aware of the enemies alerts them to some level of danger.

Now personally I believe that stealth is a much less thorny problem than social interaction. But it's still very difficult and obviously so. It would take a better designer than Mearls or whoever the fuck Paizo is getting to work on this thing to produce something that wasn't obviously worse than just "roll your stealth and check how the MC feels about it." Which sounds like a pretty low bar - and it is! - but there's also no way I would expect the PF2 people to clear that bar.

Which of course is why PF2 is DOA.

-Username17

[FatR]

The stealth minigame in my own heartbreaker has the stealthing party doing all the rolls against the highest passive perception value of the observing party.

That said, before tackling any mechanical problems of stealth, game designers, not only that of Paizo, but even going back all the way to 3.0, needed and failed to clear a bigger obstacle. They've failed to understand that for stealth to be relevant, like, at all, chances of stealthing against appropriately leveled enemies, and perhaps even against tougher enemies by default should be set to "success" for any character who is even moderately sneaky. However, from 3.0 to PF2 stealth by default is set to "failure", or close to that, and at best you really need to jump through the system mastery hoops to make it workable at all. Which is acceptable for a low-fantasy pure skirmish game, where getting a drop on your foes can and should be devastating, but not acceptable for a generalized fantasy adventure RPG, particularly once we get to the realm of high fantasy, where hiding yourself is a significant but not decisive advantage of combat, because your foes can block attacks from invisible opponents by detecting their aggression, or just rain destruction on the entire area.

[OgreBattle]

D&DPF mostly revolves around active combat turn by turn actions, mayhaps stealth can be handled by developing good 'legwork skill stuff' mechanics.

Or you just admit your game revolves around set piece encounters so stealth skills are like Warhammer battles, you can set your PC down closer to the enemy or from the flanks/rear.

----
Ah yeah the fiddly weapon system on second thought is bad because 10 goblins can get 30 attacks each with a fiddly modifier... and it encourages 'I am a curved elfsword guy, that flaming axe is not for me' builds.

[Thaluikhain]

Similarly, asking for die rolls and positioning declarations at all in a situation where the players aren't aware of the enemies alerts them to some level of danger.

Is there a good way of dealing with that? It seems that walking to the neighbourhood shops is either cutscene fluff, or everyone is walking in a staggered column watching their assigned sectors waiting for trouble and there's no in-between where surprises could happen.

Unless you had complete different things you can throw at them and the surprise is which one, I guess.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There was an (unfortunately unrealized) idea in The One Ring where the game was broadly divided into three arenas – social, travel, battle – and specing towards one penalized you in the others. For example, wearing serious armor would be a big advantage in a fight, an exhausting burden on a long overland journey and a big red flag in any social scene.

I could see something similar, where groups can declare that they are on some sort of alert level (green, yellow, red), where higher alert levels give them higher passive perception and better options if they're ambushed, but penalize travel and negotiations (like shopping).

[souran]

Guys;

We have a whole thread on why "writing stealth minigames are hard". However, 3.0, 3.5, 4e, pathfinder, 5e all have basically the same stealth rules and while not great, they do let you do a basic stealth thing.

1-2 guards is patrolling a back entrance. The party makes 4 rolls, the guards make 2 rolls and the guards see anybody who rolls below them and those who roll above them surprise the guards.

This isn't great, the in all likelihood the guards will spot 2 of the players. There is almost no chance for all 4 to sneak past the guards. The actual effect of stealth is nebulous. All that said: you can read the rules and get a result and people can agree that is the likely result.

PF2E says that the best person can lead the others in doing their stealth checks (This is a good idea!), the rules for doing so say that the players must be able to hear and speak with the person leading them (This is obviously incompatible with stealth, although if the wording allowed non-verbal communication it might be better). Then the leader makes a stealth roll, but its unclear if the guards can also have a leader who focuses their guarding to the highest roll. Then we have to check a bunch of tags which I can't be bothered to find what dangling rules threads that would lead me to. Then after that your stealth is your initiative unless its not in which case its your perception.

Seriously, there maybe a few good ideas in that jumble, but its mostly just a giant fucking mess. Writing stealth rules is hard but its twice as hard if you start with a bunch of asinine rules segments that were written to allow people to work together to lift heavy objects.

[OgreBattle]

I forgot where that stealth thread is, but yeah I'm just repeating what I said on there years about about warhams infiltration and skill challenges or something.



Going into the minigames territory...

In the "skill challenge but it's fixed" system...
- There's X amount of turns to succeed, failure is personal so everyone contributes
- To encourage variety there's 'skill fatigue' or synergies that occur
- Degrees of success can be measured by how much you exceed the TN at end of challenge

Got me thinking about how FFXiV has turn based crafting, it's pretty similar but adds in some things like...
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Crafting
-Succeeding and quality of the end product are measured differently, actions to raise quality do not raise success
- A limited resource to spend on giving extra turns, increasing
- 'Control': Every turn there's a chance (but it's like drawing from a deck, boons and banes will always happen, just in a random order) of your skills getting boosted or penalized, so you may want to 'save up' certain skills for a good or bad 'control' turn

So a generic legwork/out of combat time system could be...
- Abstracted time, including retroactive "actually I hacked the security so the camera didn't spot us"
- X amount of turns for everyone to do one skill roll at a time
- One 'meter' to fill up is the Success bar, if you don't fill it you fail at the task
- Another meter to fill is the Quality bar, if you fill it you have bonuses if you also succeeded
- A limited resource for giving an extra turn, raising quality, raising success
- Some factors to make things flavorful like locking/bane/boon on appropriate skills for the challenge

We can treat 'whole army' as an 'equipment' or 'encumbrance' modifier to the player's rolls.

Perhaps run an opposed test if you have 2+ sides actively trying to sabotage, get the jump on the other. So you save up some limited resource ability for the final turn in case the enemy forces used their limited resource to lower your amount of progress.

[Kaelik]

Guys;

We have a whole thread on why "writing stealth minigames are hard". However, 3.0, 3.5, 4e, pathfinder, 5e all have basically the same stealth rules and while not great, they do let you do a basic stealth thing.

1-2 guards is patrolling a back entrance. The party makes 4 rolls, the guards make 2 rolls and the guards see anybody who rolls below them and those who roll above them surprise the guards.

Those are the not the stealth rules for 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, or 5e. I don't know about 4e.

5e has no rules and relies on you importing the 3.5 rules into your game from your brain by accident. 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder all require each person to make one or two rolls per action and the guards to make either one or two rolls per action.

You would probably need about 50 rolls to negotiate "some people try to sneak past a guard."

[Dean]

Yeah Kaelik's correct. No game has functional stealth rules that I know of and certainly not D&D or its derivatives. Basically any reading guarantees that the stealthing party fails almost immediately. You just have a reasonable amount of mind-caulk where you roll once and then one guard makes one roll no matter how many are around and if you win you can do something reasonably stealthy within your DM's beliefs about what stealth can do.

[Mord]

PF2E says that the best person can lead the others in doing their stealth checks (This is a good idea!), the rules for doing so say that the players must be able to hear and speak with the person leading them (This is obviously incompatible with stealth, although if the wording allowed non-verbal communication it might be better). Then the leader makes a stealth roll, but its unclear if the guards can also have a leader who focuses their guarding to the highest roll. Then we have to check a bunch of tags which I can't be bothered to find what dangling rules threads that would lead me to. Then after that your stealth is your initiative unless its not in which case its your perception.

Quite some time ago, while I was fucking around with a 2d10 dice mechanic, I mathhammered out the DC differences you would need for 3 different types of group scenario:

• All May Try, One Must Pass
• One May Try, One Must Pass
• All Must Try, All Must Pass
• All Must Try, One Must Pass is the same thing as All May Try, One Must Pass for any useful purposes

Each of these three conditions on success in a group challenge results in drastically different DC pegs if you want to offer the players reasonable chances of success, and differ wildly based on the size of the party.

Systems that handle stealth as everyone rolling individually and having to pass the same DC are basically declaring automatic failure if the DC is set above a frankly insultingly low level. Even in a party of 3 heroes, there was a difference of 4 points of DC between the "All Must Try, All Must Pass" scenario and the "One Must Try, One Must Pass" scenario, and 7 points of DC between the AMTAMP and "All May Try, One Must Pass" scenario to stick close to 75% overall chance of success. I never got around to mathhammering that out to 6 heroes, but I have doubts it would even fit on a 2d10 RNG.

This is why I'm very much a fan of resolving group checks as "All May Try, One Must Pass." Too bad about the rest of the PF2e mechanics.

[Omegonthesane]

Sort of preferred Dice Funk's "All May Try, Half Must Pass" but I don't think that's a stated rule in any existing system.

[souran]

Guys;

This is not about the results of passing stealth checks. You can argue all day about if the results 3.x gives are good or bad, or simply indeterminate.

However, you can actually perform the steps without hitting fail points.

You roll your stealth check (or to make sure Kaelik is happy hide and move silently in 3.0). Those looking for you make perception checks (or again for Kaelik's benefit spot and listen). Sure if your characters start 100 feet out from their destination there could be an explosion of required rolls that would rending being able to actually stealth to a location impossible.

In any individual round you can follow the procedure that is laid out in the the PHB. The players make their rolls, with associated modifiers. The DM makes the enemies rolls with modifiers. The modifiers are clear. The number of rolls for a party of 4, even assuming separate hide/move silently is 8 plus 8 per "observer", and that is assuming a brutally literal reading of the rules more than and the DM not collapsing all the guards to a single roll. So, I don't see 50 rolls in a round but It would get to 50 rolls or more if you had everybody keep rolling every round (as per the rules) as they tried to move across say 100 ft. of space.

This doesn't even take into account that "stealth" is not a condition with defined effects. There are other real problems. All of these other problems are irrelevant because:

With Pathfinder 2E is that I cannot even read the procedure for making stealth rolls without hitting rules fragments that lead to contradictions that make it seemingly unplayable. I know that in the end its going to be the same sort of opposed d20 test that people have been making for 20 years now. However, if you follow those rules you will eventually hit a symbol, or keyword, or reference that takes you to a rule that if utilized would invalidate the point of being stealthy.

Additionally, it isn't just stealth that is like this, its every skill. It's every rule. There was no attempt to streamline anything so everything is highly complex and that complexity nets you exactly nothing that 5e doesn't give you basically the exact same result by saying "roll 2 dice and take the best"

[Kaelik]

Guys;

This is not about the results of passing stealth checks. You can argue all day about if the results 3.x gives are good or bad, or simply indeterminate.

However, you can actually perform the steps without hitting fail points.

You roll your stealth check (or to make sure Kaelik is happy hide and move silently in 3.0). Those looking for you make perception checks (or again for Kaelik's benefit spot and listen). Sure if your characters start 100 feet out from their destination there could be an explosion of required rolls that would rending being able to actually stealth to a location impossible.

0) it is a little odd that you think hide and move silently only exist in 3.0.

1) the difference between "sneaking from X to Y takes 1 roll per PC and 1 roll per enemy" and "sneaking from X to Y takes 14 rolls per person and 14 rolls per enemy" is not primarily one of "difficulty at success" sure you will almost certainly fail if you have similar numbers, but nothing stops you from designing numbers to be far enough apart to make failure as unlikely. The point being made here is that if your rules are SO FUCKING BAD that they require 50 or more rolls to cover sneaking 100ft that no one is going to actually use them. They are, for all practical purposes, functionally as impossible to resolve as 4e Shadowrun Matrix actions. As soon as anyone at the table actually starts following those rules and beginning the roll athon, when they get to their 5th fucking roll they are just going to give up, make up houserules, and ignore your rules from then on.

This is so obviously true that most people don't even start following the rules even the first time, as you yourself demonstrated by instinctively editing your own brain to replace all stealth rules in 4 different games/editions with your own houserules and then completely forget those are houserules.

The rules are so bad that you had a traumatic episode the first time you read them and deliberately forgot them and papered over a fake memory you found more comforting! These are not examples of good rules that players can use.

[souran]

0) it is a little odd that you think hide and move silently only exist in 3.0.

1) the difference between "sneaking from X to Y takes 1 roll per PC and 1 roll per enemy" and "sneaking from X to Y takes 14 rolls per person and 14 rolls per enemy" is not primarily one of "difficulty at success" sure you will almost certainly fail if you have similar numbers, but nothing stops you from designing numbers to be far enough apart to make failure as unlikely. The point being made here is that if your rules are SO FUCKING BAD that they require 50 or more rolls to cover sneaking 100ft that no one is going to actually use them. They are, for all practical purposes, functionally as impossible to resolve as 4e Shadowrun Matrix actions. As soon as anyone at the table actually starts following those rules and beginning the roll athon, when they get to their 5th fucking roll they are just going to give up, make up houserules, and ignore your rules from then on.

This is so obviously true that most people don't even start following the rules even the first time, as you yourself demonstrated by instinctively editing your own brain to replace all stealth rules in 4 different games/editions with your own houserules and then completely forget those are houserules.

The rules are so bad that you had a traumatic episode the first time you read them and deliberately forgot them and papered over a fake memory you found more comforting! These are not examples of good rules that players can use.

0) This was mostly to irritate you, I admit it. However, over the 20+ years of d20 based rpgs that are built in the rotten festering corpse of 3.0 I have simply played to many of them to remember exactly which ones folded those skills and which didn't. If you put me on the spot I will not remember if the Stargate RPG used hide and move silently or just had a stealth skill.

1) You seem to think my argument is that those rules are good. They are not. They are, however, followable as a procedure. I could write computer code to follow the stealth rules of 3.x all the way through 5e. I could define what to roll, with what modifers, and when. Now some of them (I'm looking at you 5e with your BS natural language) have more interpretation than others. Additionally, the existence of temple of elemental evil computer game proves this statement true.

I have read the rules for pathfinder 2e and I am not sure I could do this for most tasks. I think I could make attack rolls, however I am worried that if somebody used a weapon more complicated than a featureless club and the other person raised their shield I am not certain we couldn't find something that created a single point failure.

That said, Stealth is the easiest one to pick on because it is so obvious that the designer intent was to have the rogue be able to "lead" the plate wearer and the wizard in sneaking around stuff, but whoever wrote the "leading" rules was thinking of people working together to lift objects or do buffy esque monster research.

[deaddmwalking]

So I expected Pathfinder 2 to sell well out the gate, even it turns out to be a failure. It does not appear to be selling well at all.

Several people were tracking the sales position on Amazon and there were moments where it was #1 in RPGs, but normally it has NOT been. And it looks like it has fallen FAST.

There are Paizo diehards who insist that it WILL sell well when people wrap up their current campaigns and the new P2 Adventure Paths come out.

Is that possible? I saw a link saying that Paizo cut two developers from staff. Is this doing REALLY BADLY and is there objective evidence?

[souran]

So I expected Pathfinder 2 to sell well out the gate, even it turns out to be a failure. It does not appear to be selling well at all.

Several people were tracking the sales position on Amazon and there were moments where it was #1 in RPGs, but normally it has NOT been. And it looks like it has fallen FAST.

There are Paizo diehards who insist that it WILL sell well when people wrap up their current campaigns and the new P2 Adventure Paths come out.

Is that possible? I saw a link saying that Paizo cut two developers from staff. Is this doing REALLY BADLY and is there objective evidence?

I have no sales data but it seems to be more of the same.

1) There is no edition warring. Nobody seems to care in the Pathfinder Reddit. PF2E does not dominate the generic pathfinder thread and the dedicated PF2E thread is mostly people asking "how does this work". This may or may not be because its so new, but it doesn't appear to have slowed down 5e traffic at all.

[Kaelik]

1) You seem to think my argument is that those rules are good. They are not. They are, however, followable as a procedure. I could write computer code to follow the stealth rules of 3.x all the way through 5e. I could define what to roll, with what modifers, and when. Now some of them (I'm looking at you 5e with your BS natural language) have more interpretation than others. Additionally, the existence of temple of elemental evil computer game proves this statement true.

You seem to be deliberately refusing to understand my point. I am not saying you think they are good, I am saying you think that a group can follow them. I am repeating for the third time that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a group to follow them. The comparison point is the 4e Matrix rules. You can write a computer script that does it, but you CANNOT make a human being do it, ever.

So much so that, again, you LITERALLY mindwiped the rules and made up your own houserules which you explained that people can do in the post where you made this claim of functionality in the first place.

[Dean]

Also you definitely couldn't get a computer to run 5e's stealth rules. 5E's rules are to make a check against an undefined DC that lets you do vaguely stealthy things for an undescribed period of time. 5E's rules are too incomplete for a human brain to run nevermind a computer. At best you could say you could write stealth rules inspired by 5th edition and the connection between them would be tenuous at best.