Pathfinder 2e

[OgreBattle]

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?

/r/Pathfinder is dominated by PF1e discussion, there's a separate reddit for 2e with significantly slower activity. It's larger than the D&D4e subreddit yeah, but I feel the 4e subreddit has happier people.

[tussock]

Paizo mostly sells their own stuff, rather than on Amazon. I mean, it's a strictly better deal to buy the books from Paizo, you get a free pdf with them there and only there.

Pazio also mostly has their own message boards.


Like, there's reasons WotC/D&D sells a lot of stuff on Amazon and also has a lot of chat on random internet places. But it's that they don't really provide that stuff themselves.

--

Personally I think most stealth systems could just output how close you can get to the opposition before they notice you, and if you never get that close then they don't. You have to have the random guard movement generator produce compatible outputs, in terms of how close does the guard get to you, but that's doable.

[Username17]

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?

It's not unusual for an RPG production company to drop a bunch of designers after the core books are made. The corollary to "core books sell" is "expansion books are cheap to make." An expansion book like Sword and Fist can get primary writing done in a month and doesn't usually need playtesters because it's all coloring in the lines.

A game like PF2 letting a bunch of designers go after the PHB comes out could just mean that there's a lot less design work to be done now that they've settled on an action economy and a skill list and shit. But it does kind of look like the whole thing is DOA and headed to be abandonware sooner rather than later.

-Username17

[Kevin Mack]

Dont suppose you know which two developers it is?

[deaddmwalking]

I am sorry if I am spreading false rumors. Apparently it was not a link. The statement was:

There we go, it is confirmed Owen K.C. Stephens and Stephen Radney-MacFarland have left Paizo.

This particular poster was responding to someone previously saying that layoffs would be a sign of failure; he rejects that layoffs mean that, but he brought it into the conversation. Maybe I just don't understand what he is trying to say?

Can anyone verify that statement?

[Kevin Mack]

Well I knew Owen's had left although he was less developer and more runner of starfinder society if memory serves also reasons were apparently more personal (Wife had a new job on the other side of the country or something like that)

[Iduno]

Wasn't Starfinder the sequel to Pathfinder that neither of the players enjoyed because it was too dumbed down?

[Orca]

There's a lot of reasons not to like Starfinder. 20-level characters and weapons/armor which scale with those levels are a really odd fit for anything science-fictiony. For all they tried very explicitly to wipe out direct connections to the Golarion world its setting originates from, you still need some understanding of Golarion to make sense of it. For people who have that understanding, the total absence of full spellcasters is puzzling at best. The space combat system pulls very little from the roleplaying game it's based on and the basic math of that combat system didn't work at first - it looks like it wasn't playtested even internally and was probably written in a hurry to fill a gap or to replace a system which they dumped. 'Science fantasy' isn't really a genre.

It does have a following of devoted players, but there aren't a lot of them. Enough for it to be worth Paizo's while to keep writing books for them, not enough for them to get Owen to stay on or to work freelance for them when he had to move.

[Kevin Mack]

Honestly I suspect it is not doing as well as they planned between the sales ranking, the number of people cancelling there subscriptions on the run up to the release, choices they seem to have made with certain things (Offering a 1e pathfinder and 5E Dungeons and dragons option for kingmaker for instance) and the lack of much talk of the edition outside of Paizo's on forums I just cannot see how it could be doing well for them.

[Previn]

If you don't care about Starfinder, feel free to ignore this.

Wasn't Starfinder the sequel to Pathfinder that neither of the players enjoyed because it was too dumbed down?

It has lots and lots of massive issues.

First, you are super duper on rails for advancement. Like you cannot and will not get off the number train in either direction. The only way you can fail this number train is the ultra-terrible gear grind. Your laser rifle has a level, and you HAVE to trade in your weapon every 2 or so levels for a new higher level weapon that does more damage to stay in the game. The same for armor, and other equipment.

Well actually, you can auto-fail the number game because the designers FACTUALLY and PROVABLE made the DCs to do things at higher levels ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE for all but 1 specific build, that also basically has to roll the maximum possible to do so. Like I can't even begin to get into this. The autoscaling DCs numbers were broken in testing, pointed out, broken in print and then had to be errata using fan provided numbers. The problems they didn't fix all the scaling DCs, only some of them, that the fans pointed out.

The skill system is butt. This was driven home to me recently when the GM asked who could pilot a trunk, and all 8 players could, with only a 0-2 skill point difference. The only way to really abuse the skill system is the operative class, which gets basically all the skills, and bonuses to all the skills and is overpowered on top of that because how much other stuff it gets on top that it's good at, and how terrible all the other classes are.

I am not kidding on this. Whatever skill you have, the operative most likely has too and is as good or better than you at it. If they don't have the skill, they still may be better than you at it.

Magic is utter ass. The spells suck hard core, and you get a super limited number of uses of them. In my group of 8 players, one person has magic, and they regret the decision to play a caster (mystic), a lot.

I play a mechanic. I'm level 5 and I've never once been attacked. I know there is stamina and hp, and there is some difference, but I've never taken damage so I don't actually know or care. I just happen to stay in the back and am just note notable in combat unless you actually run the numbers (I do the most damage per round of the group, but I think I'm the only on that knows that). At the same time, everyone of my turns is a combination of the following: move and shoot, buff myself and my drone and we both shoot. Do nothing because no point. I would like to pretend I have other options in combat and I'm not using them but really I don't.

The game pretends that I can hack computers, but it's pointless (DCs are impossible to get any useful access) and retiredly dangerous to do. It will be another 3 levels for me before, if I continue to max my skill, and roll a natural 20, I can hack and have full access to a level 1 computer, which is the equivalent to an iPad.

I tagged along to a Starfinder society game as a 4th so the could get a level before GenCon. Our session was literally 3 scenes. A bar scene, which was utter shit, and if you make 1 skill check you 'pass' the entire scene and get some stupid about of XP, and 2 fights. I am not exaggerating here. Travel was ignored completely, no skill checks outside of combat were made except for my 1 in the bar, there was no exploration, just an ambush that automatically happened, and then arriving at some mine entrance where it was small enough that it took us 2 moves to get to the end. Oh, and there was a trap in the mines.

On top of all of this, if you are an actual fan of real science fiction the setting is a god damned train wreck clearly written by people who don't understand technology of today, let along what we will have in the future, the implications of things they're putting in like super strong materials, unlimited energy or ubiquitous networking, databases and the ease of surveillance.

I play because it's with friends, but every session is a drain on my soul.

Edit: Oh man, I totally forgot about the ships. You get a ship. You can't sell it, you can't spend money or use salvage to upgrade/improve it. It automatically improves as you level, but at the same time it gets harder to use, and the DCs scale faster than your advancement. I had forgotten about it because in the first session we got 1 ship combat, and then the official module stole our ship so we couldn't use it, and then the same session we got it back, the GM auto-shot us down to railroad the plot on a deserted planet, so we've spent the last 3 levels collecting stuff to fix our ship. And by stuff I mean we collect the UBP which is just shitty short hand for 'gold you can only use for crafting, but you can't actually make anything above your level, or useful, or re-sell anything you make at a profit. But it doesn't matter because ship combat is a solved issue. You get that fastest ship you can, and you get the longest ranged weapon, and it breaks just like having a mounted archer in 4e.

[Kevin Mack]

Also if there current adventure design is anything to go by there in trouble

(First Ap adventure of the new edition has a room with two birds basically being used as sentries said room is utterly pitch black and these birds do not have dark vision this is by the designers own words intentional due to "consider this from the original intent that was to give characters with darkvision a chance to enjoy their advantage. " and "In cases where no PC needs light, or a PC with darkvision sneaks ahead... this encounter gives that party or that PC a fun reward for a character choice and lets them use something to their advantage. That's a nice change of pace now and then for players to encounter, and makes them feel like the world isn't always perfectly poised to defeat them. Sometimes the bad guys make mistakes too."

What makes this really baffeling is the force they would be posting sentries against wouldent be the PC's who they have never encounterd yet but against the local tribe of Goblins......who all have darkvision. Theres making a mistake and making your badguys make a saturday morning cartoon Villain look like a tactical genius.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

I legitimately do not understand who PF2E is supposed to appeal to at all.

The big appeal of Pathfinder - such as it was - was to cash in on 3.5 fans who rightfully thought 4e was garbage and didn't want to play it. This worked extremely well because 4e was bad and poorly marketed.

Now to compete with 5e, they're combining the worst parts of Pathfinder (the needless Paizo complexity where you have a ton of moving parts) and the worst parts of 4e (lack of narrative-influencing abilities, minor damage boosts being disguised as exciting options, classes requiring a ton of nigh-redundant powers to be written to function - we know the drill). Reading the playtest book they put out was...well, I wrote a review.

Now I legitimately don't know who is left to actually market this to. The 4e crowd consists of our old friends Darwinism and company who insist that 4e fixed all the problems with D&D ever so why did 5e throw it away - a vocal minority, but not enough for a market. There are the people who have switched their tribal identity to Pathfinder instead of D&D I suppose, but given that that the original call for Pathfinder was "abandon your identity as a WotC fan", how loyal are those people going to be?

Hell, 5e's ruleset objectively sucks and they're only releasing a new class after five years, but they have good word of mouth and most of the community here is playing...5e. Purely anecdotal but I don't hear any interest in Pathfinder at all.

[OgreBattle]

The austerity of that white website page is calming

[Yesterday's Hero]

Last Saturday was my last time DMing 2e. We played the final session of the first book in the AP and they got TPKed by the final encounter because critical fails on saves vs damage effects making you take double damage and enemy spellcasters that are 1 spell level above the party don't mix no good (also, clerics are broken). The TPK is not really the reason we'll stop playing it, I decided to quit DMing the game because I had many problems with it and they mostly agreed.

I had read the second book and thought it was completely un-original and un-fun. It reminded me of that Red Hand Doom bit where you have to befriend a tribe of wild elves to get their help because that is, almost word for word, what you have to do at the beginning of the second adventure.

So we made some characters for the heartbreaker I'm making and next week we'll begin with that, see how that works out.

[souran]

I legitimately do not understand who PF2E is supposed to appeal to at all.

The big appeal of Pathfinder - such as it was - was to cash in on 3.5 fans who rightfully thought 4e was garbage and didn't want to play it. This worked extremely well because 4e was bad and poorly marketed.

Now to compete with 5e, they're combining the worst parts of Pathfinder (the needless Paizo complexity where you have a ton of moving parts) and the worst parts of 4e (lack of narrative-influencing abilities, minor damage boosts being disguised as exciting options, classes requiring a ton of nigh-redundant powers to be written to function - we know the drill). Reading the playtest book they put out was...well, I wrote a review.

Now I legitimately don't know who is left to actually market this to. The 4e crowd consists of our old friends Darwinism and company who insist that 4e fixed all the problems with D&D ever so why did 5e throw it away - a vocal minority, but not enough for a market. There are the people who have switched their tribal identity to Pathfinder instead of D&D I suppose, but given that that the original call for Pathfinder was "abandon your identity as a WotC fan", how loyal are those people going to be?

Hell, 5e's ruleset objectively sucks and they're only releasing a new class after five years, but they have good word of mouth and most of the community here is playing...5e. Purely anecdotal but I don't hear any interest in Pathfinder at all.

The reason that PF2E has some things that look like 4E is because the design of 4E is a fairly obvious extension of the things that people complain about 3E. A DECADE AGO when 4E came out it had a terrible marketing campaign that decided to insult people for likeing 3rd edition. While adopting that Tone was stupid, the points that were made were the same ones that were being made on every forum. 4E does fix the things that people were pissed about in 2008. It also does it in the most obvious and straightforward way. However, people pay game designers to not take the obvious route.

PF2E exists because their player base was shrinking because you can't keep selling a 20 year old game without doing some kind of new revision to clean up your ideas, and amazingly their own player base was making the same arguments from 2008 about PF1E. It took a decade but even paizo fanboys figured out that vital strike was not the answer to linear fighters and quadratic wizards.

[Suzerain]

The fundamental issue with both PF2 and 4e is that while they may, in theory, address some of the issues with 3.X, they do it in a way that is fundamentally shit.

• To address martial/caster disparity, they lower the ceiling rather than raise the floor. This is shit for the same reason that cutting a piece of wood too short is worse than cutting it too long. It's far easier to play down than up.
  To address specific abilities being able to disrupt traditional narratives, they simply eliminated those abilities. This is shit because it's done for a fundamentally bad reason - to preserve low-level storylines into high levels.
  To address numerical differences between PCs, they put everyone on a bonus schedule that is difficult to leave. This is shit because it leads to math-tax abilities, and even though a +1 might be rare, it still isn't exciting.

Most of these "solutions" are far worse than the problems they aimed to solve.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

4e didn't really fix any of the problems with 3.X. The big change that all the 4e crew loved was that warlock was the shit class instead of fighter, but you still had a lot of the same problems:

-Casters had actual out of combat abilities and warriors did not. This got much worse with splatbooks with free rituals and actual utility powers.
-Wrecking people with orbizards was much faster than going through the motions of blasting people for 5 damage against their 80 hp, so you didn't fix the oft-cited rocket tag problem. If anything, the HP bloat made rocket tag more appealing.
-Despite promising to kill the Christmas tree, it came back in a big way because the 4e developers were incompetent.
-Entire character concepts were fixed by their absence or by applying arbitrary immersion breaking limitations. When 4e first came out, there were no pets aside from the infernal warlock soul stealing thing. Same with shapeshifters. When these concepts were introduced, they came with MMO style limitations wjere a 1st level druid who turned into a dog couldn't figure out how to bite people.
-Exception based design made it impossible to truly fix anything. All of the various pets worked on special snowflake rules, so while the invoker pets could attack as a minor action, the ranger was stuck wasting his standard to get a wolf - a pack hunter - to attack something that threatened him every turn. This got hilariously ignored with the necromancer cleric which can raise a nigh-infinite army with Shackles of the Grave.

This is not a route I would take for commercial success.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is not a route I would take for commercial success.

However, it is a route you would inevitably take if you A) were aware of the problems of the previous edition, B) didn't know how or why the previous edition's game mechanics were successful (or even if they were) and C) didn't know how to design a tabletop game yet played lots of video games.

4E D&D is a lot like fascism. It's the DEFAULT thought process of certain personality traits, not some learned and researched position. If I had gotten together John Calhoun, the 1880s Japanese zaibatsu, some nazi punks from the 1980s, Donald Trump, and the first members of the KKK, got them together, and asked them individually to design their ideal society and then compared their notes I'd get something eerily similar -- that is, fascism. I'd have to rewind time before the 1st Industrial Revolution before random reactionaries I plucked off of the street would give me something noticeably different.

And so it goes with 4E D&D. If you, like the typical Paizo or WotC dev who lived through the d20 revolution AND watched the supernova of MMORPGs, have a stunted vision where D&D is ideally a pencil-and-paper version of Return of the King plus Final Fantasy, you're going to create something like 4E D&D or PF2.

[Username17]

We've had a lot of discussions about 4e, but I think the biggest single issue is that nobody seems to have developed any of the ideas in it.

Let's take the Skill Challenges. The thirty second pitch for those is actually pretty good. And the fail states that 4e's skill challenges had were extremely obvious and had relatively easy solutions. Given the idea of skill challenges and thinking about possible fail states that ight have, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to come up with:

• Skill Challenges have a fixed number of rounds and each character can act in each round.
• The DCs on the skill challenges are remotely on the RNG for what the player characters can actually do.
• More "difficult" skill changes have a higher number of needed hits per round to get to the success state.

Those are not difficult adjustments, and would have required only the most minimal amount of discussion and mathhammering to fix the release problems of:

• Acting in Skill Challenges actively reduces your team's chances of success unless you have the highest relevant skill modifier.
• The DCs have no relation to the skill bonuses characters actually have and challenges are as close to impossible as makes no odds.
• The number of allowed failures goes up faster, relatively speaking, than the number of required hits, meaning that the "more difficult" challenges are actually easier.

But as Lago points out:

And so it goes with 4E D&D. If you, like the typical Paizo or WotC dev who lived through the d20 revolution AND watched the supernova of MMORPGs, have a stunted vision where D&D is ideally a pencil-and-paper version of Return of the King plus Final Fantasy, you're going to create something like 4E D&D or PF2.

The skill challenges of 4e weren't something that was impossible or even difficult to "do right" or at least do much better. But the 4e team was never going to do it better because they honestly weren't creative enough or mathy enough to even understand why the first draft didn't work. And they weren't interested or dedicated enough to playtest the fucking things twenty times and take honest assessment of how it worked to even realize that their first draft didn't work.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

I know you say that the idea of skill challenges is good, but I can't for the life of me remember why you think that is. If you represented a combat as an "attack challenge" where you go around the table asking people what attack they used and having them roll until they got enough successes, you'd successfully remove all the tactics from combat. Isn't removing all the tactics from non combat done just fine by 5e's approach of not having rules for skills and just telling people to have fun rolling dice?

I guess it's more fun sometimes to have "convincing the king to give you his kingdom" consist of six rolls with six different (half-baked) reasons rather than just one, even if the odds are the same.

[Ignimortis]

And so it goes with 4E D&D. If you, like the typical Paizo or WotC dev who lived through the d20 revolution AND watched the supernova of MMORPGs, have a stunted vision where D&D is ideally a pencil-and-paper version of Return of the King plus Final Fantasy, you're going to create something like 4E D&D or PF2.

LotR and Final Fantasy don't go together. Like, they REALLY don't. It's actually the reason for me NOT to play 4e, 5e or PF2e - they're a bit too heavy on LotR and low on Final Fantasy.

[jt]

"Roll skill modified by relevancy, first team to N successes wins" is the entire combat system of the Risus hack I use for dumb oneshots. You can run whole games on it, it's fine.

Ideally you have some meaty tactical system appropriate for whatever the players are doing. But sometimes the party enters a baking contest. A skill challenge system is just a way of temporarily turning the game into a Risus hack when you run into that sort of DMing emergency.

[DrPraetor]

I know you say that the idea of skill challenges is good, but I can't for the life of me remember why you think that is. ...
I guess it's more fun sometimes to have "convincing the king to give you his kingdom" consist of six rolls with six different (half-baked) reasons rather than just one, even if the odds are the same.

Let's say that my character, Glenn Arroyo, is inferior in combat to the street samurai and (much, as it happens) inferior to the mage/face is social situations (Glenn is both a decker and a surgeon, so he makes other people's cyberware cheaper/better and has no trouble pulling his own weight overall.)

Now, in a combat situation, we all take turns rolling dice and even my below-maximal super reflexes and combat dice are still another source of small arms fire, so Glenn contributes meaningfully to combat. Now, as it happens, Shadowrun combat isn't that tactically interesting and it is basically: we take turns rolling dice; but, this is still much better than the alternative where Glenn is the 4th most lethal super-assassin on the team so he just ignores combat. Combat is a huge part of shadowrun, I would get bored. You could make shadowrun combat tactically interesting if you buffed up the covering fire minigame or something, but the point would still be that Glenn wants to show up with an assault weapon and help cap fools rather than stay home.

In a social situation, Glenn swings very few dice (it was part of my character concept.) It is still a better game if Glenn shows up to the meetings and contributes just by being there and on your team than if Glenn has to stay home or sit in the corner and be quiet because he's only Charisma 2 and Etiquette 3. Showing up to meets and menacing each other in future-80s outfits is also a huge part of Shadowrun, and I would get bored if I couldn't participate.

Now, whether the social minigame then has interesting tactics (related to keywords or otherwise), is as-with-combat another question, but whether the tactics are interesting or not, as an ensemble game with a random number generator it will almost definitionally involve me taking turns rolling dice with the other characters.

[Username17]

I know you say that the idea of skill challenges is good, but I can't for the life of me remember why you think that is. If you represented a combat as an "attack challenge" where you go around the table asking people what attack they used and having them roll until they got enough successes, you'd successfully remove all the tactics from combat. Isn't removing all the tactics from non combat done just fine by 5e's approach of not having rules for skills and just telling people to have fun rolling dice?

I guess it's more fun sometimes to have "convincing the king to give you his kingdom" consist of six rolls with six different (half-baked) reasons rather than just one, even if the odds are the same.

At the core, combat is going around the table rolling dice and counting successes. There are various additional elements added such as weighting those successes via damage output, but to a first approximation that is indeed what is going on. You could add that kind of complexity to a skill challenge, but only after your core system of turns and success was adequate. "Each player gets a turn, hits advance towards success state, misses do not, the challenge advances towards fail state if you don't hit the success state by X rounds of turns" is an adequate foundation - what they actually went with was not.

The "skill challenge initiative test" was a classic example of cargo cult design failure. Why did the 4e design team think they had enough of a skill challenge system to add an initiative test?

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

"adequate foundation" for what though.

Let's take an old D&D standby, a room in a tomb with a locked chest and things in it: someone can roll search to look for traps and hidden panels; someone can try to pick or disintegrate the lock on the chest; someone can roll knowledge on the tapestries to recognize some ancient myth or whatever; and a bunch of other random things. What would a good Skill Challenge mechanic add to your "interacting with the room" experience?