Pathfinder 2e

[merxa]

I think a lot of people here are way to seeped in 3.x action economy to make an accurate judgement on how wonky it really is. Explaining 3.x actions to new players is never very easy or simple. And even after many years of play questions crop up from time to time, especially on what actions if any can be converted to other actions, and those judgments are often more RAI then.RAW or just openly house rule territory.

Not to defend pf2, but going from std, move, or full, plus swift/immediate, plus free plus speaking (a type of free non action that can happen at any time), not to mention non action triggers, to 3 actions plus reactions and speech isn't defacto worse, and on paper is probably better framework.

[Foxwarrior]

Both of you just managed to forget attacks of opportunity.

[Username17]

I think a lot of people here are way to seeped in 3.x action economy to make an accurate judgement on how wonky it really is. Explaining 3.x actions to new players is never very easy or simple. And even after many years of play questions crop up from time to time, especially on what actions if any can be converted to other actions, and those judgments are often more RAI then.RAW or just openly house rule territory.

Not to defend pf2, but going from std, move, or full, plus swift/immediate, plus free plus speaking (a type of free non action that can happen at any time), not to mention non action triggers, to 3 actions plus reactions and speech isn't defacto worse, and on paper is probably better framework.

Again and still "You get three actions which are fully fungible except that later actions are sometimes not worth as much" is total fucking garbage. Over and above that, the 3e thing where movement can be traded for offense is bad because it encourages boring static battlefields.

I hate 4e, but it did have the absolute best explanation of action types. Move, Minor, Standard, Reaction, Free Action is the absolute cleanest action descriptions have ever been, and that is what you'd want to build on. Certainly not any action economy with a baked-in assumption that moving inherently came at the cost of offensive power.

The big problem 4e's action economy has is the idea of there only being allowed one Reaction per round of turns (and no Reactions on your turn). As this limit ends up making threatened areas and shit largely pointless. No one ends up caring about the soft zones of control or whatever because the action economy keeps characters from being able to do anything about enemies flaunting their triggers. But the "Move, Minor, Standard" portion works really well and is incredibly clear terminology. There's no reason to confuse matters with 5e-like obfuscation.

-Username17

[Dean]

I too have been using 4E's action types in my homebrews but the Reaction limit is no small problem. My current hotfix is to have "Free Reactions" which are reactions that don't count against your one official Reaction. That way you could have Combat Reflexes make someone's first 2 attacks of opportunity count as Free Reactions, thus giving them 3 AOO's or 2 AOO's and their official Reaction each round.

I don't love the introduction of a secret 6th action type that combines two, but it's the best fix I've figured out. AOO's are the best way I've seen in any game to do area control and one per turn doesn't cut it. Lots of people say to just cut out interrupts and reactions entirely but I really don't think that's valid in a turn based game that attempts to be versimilitudinous. Even basic ideas like shooting a crossbow when the orc opens the door need a place to go, so reactions or interrupts are something that needs to be there.

It just occurred to me that you could kludge AOO's as a single reaction that effects everyone for a round, and maybe that would look better to people. So something like..
Control Zone:[Reaction]Until the start of your turn, any time someone leaves an area you threaten you may make one attack on them in response.

[brized]

BTW, anyone know what sort of sales #2000 in books on Amazon means?

There's a calculator for that - https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-bo ... alculator/

The P2 core rulebook has a BSR of 2,532 right now. That means roughly 1330 sales per month. The special edition book is rank 52,469, for an estimated 88 sales per month. P2 released on August 1, so P2 has sold something around 3,300 core books on Amazon as of this writing.

[jt]

You don't need a special type of action for readied actions; those can just be whatever action type you were using before, delayed. That can potentially apply to attacks of opportunity as well: maybe they're just a standard kind of readied action.

A very on-the-ball group averages 4 seconds per time control switches between players, and D&D attacks average about 50 seconds, so attacks of opportunity do slow the game down by about a minute each. It's an expensive feature. But, Dean is right that people need to be able to act off their turn for the game to have much verisimilitude.

You can square that circle by making it so attacks of opportunity are usually bad, or bad for most characters. For example, the universal rule might be that you can spend your standard action to get an attack of opportunity - this sucks enough that you usually won't do it. Then to complete the example, the fighter gets a class feature where they can spend their move action or swift action to get an attack of opportunity - something worth actually using. This lets the character that actually cares about using attacks to control space exercise that part of the game's mechanics, while other characters don't. And it means only specific players need to constantly watch the board - specifically the players who invested in character concepts that require it.

There's a calculator for that - https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-bo ... alculator/

The P2 core rulebook has a BSR of 2,532 right now. That means roughly 1330 sales per month.

Well that's super neat, thanks for sharing!

Any idea how much profit they make per book? I have no idea what a book costs to produce for a self-run publisher.

[Axebird]

Monster creation rules are out. I haven't read them yet.

[Kevin Mack]

I'm more curious if there just another thing they copied from 4E?

[OgreBattle]

The big problem 4e's action economy has is the idea of there only being allowed one Reaction per round of turns (and no Reactions on your turn). As this limit ends up making threatened areas and shit largely pointless. No one ends up caring about the soft zones of control or whatever because the action economy keeps characters from being able to do anything about enemies flaunting their triggers. But the "Move, Minor, Standard" portion works really well and is incredibly clear terminology. There's no reason to confuse matters with 5e-like obfuscation.

What's a quick fix?

In Tenra Bansho Zero you get an 'infinite' amount of counter actions, the game designer says right out that's the method of dealing with hordes, you throw your hero into risk to get a counterattack against every little dude. Something like that seems good for the kind of imagery D&D has of Conan berserking through a boat and Drizzt berserking through a boat.

Final Fantasy Tactic's has reactive counters and it feels awesome to have your skillful knight get attacked by 3 dudes and counterstrike all of them.

Maybe it only activates if the target rolled an odd number to hit you, so it only happens 50% of the time, this seems less time consuming to me than tracking how many reactive abilities based on class level, DEX, magic and so on 20+ goblins have.

[Orca]

Monster creation rules are out. I haven't read them yet.

A lot of vague stuff. The word 'feel' comes up 14 times. There are tables with suggested values for extreme/high/moderate/low versions of those stats at levels -1 to 24, and some suggestions as to which might go together, e.g. 'Skirmisher high Dex; low Fortitude, high Reflex; higher Speed than typical'. There are no suggestions for speed except for mentioning that a normal human has speed 25 and a reminder that creatures can move 3 times their speed in a round. Special abilities are just as vague.

[MGuy]

I use the 4e action system words for the same reasons as Frank pointed out. I had considered using fungible actions on every turn but for some reason this made things more complicated for people. Something about being able to convert one action to another action slows things up for people as I guess the additional consideration, in practice, fucks up the flow for people and the benefits (if there are any) aren't able to make up for that. Same thing for having an action point style initiative system which is ideally the system I'd like but probably will only ever work in videogames where they can be calculated by a computer.

I do not agree with Frank's assertion that you shouldn't be able to trade movement actions for power, accuracy, rider effects, defensive boons, etc. There are a lot of reasons why on a battlefield you might just not want to move and there's no reason why that lack of movement should go to waste. 4e has also taught me that 'just' being able to move every turn isn't itself all that interesting. What you probably don't want to do is allow for a character's standard (or expected) damage or effectiveness to be calculated by assuming they haven't moved in that turn (full attacks) because then not having to move turns from being just a boon you can get through proper positioning to it being necessary to be effective at all which I believe is worse.

This dynamic also opens up more depth for combat. By doing this players have a reason to want to force their targets to move, it gives value to forcing targets to utilize move actions to get out of ongoing area effects, rewards players who are positioned well enough and have enough control over the battlefield to make the judgment to utilize their move actions, and in practice seems to be more easily remembered than using a swift action to do the same. For some reason, I'm going to guess because moving is a more dynamic action than a swift/minor action, players seem to be able to remember that they are sacrificing a move action to do a thing and don't seem to forget them as often as minor/swift actions.

As for zones of control I suggest the same thing I suggested to jt and just default make Attacks of Opportunity straight up stop people from doing stuff and cut the bullshit. No casting defensively, no 5ft steps, no getting your ranged attack off, and no moving past people once you've been hit. If you get hit you get stopped. I'm not sure there's a point in having AoO's the way they are without making them meaningful by default. jt points out that AoOs take up more time but if they are 'this' punishing opponents should reasonably be doing more to avoid them otherwise they are big risks. I don't see another reason to arbitrarily limit how many different people can trigger your AoOs. There's probably a reason to have it be once per specific target (like to prevent infinite loops) but I don't see any great meaning in limiting how many different targets you can effect (swarms and such obviously counting as one creature).

[deaddmwalking]

I do not agree with Frank's assertion that you shouldn't be able to trade movement actions for power, accuracy, rider effects, defensive boons, etc. There are a lot of reasons why on a battlefield you might just not want to move and there's no reason why that lack of movement should go to waste.

There are a lot of times you'll WANT to move, but if moving has an additional opportunity cost, you might choose not to. If these rider effects are too good, people will feel like they can't move.

That doesn't mean you can't do them - but you have to balance them VERY CAREFULLY. In 3.x, running lets you move fast, but you lose your Dex and are very easy to hit. If moving at all was the equivalent of running, I don't think it'd happen at all. And if the bonus is insignificant, then tracking it is it's own pain.

I think the better option is to not provide any additional 'costs' to movement. If not moving causes you to 'lose' your move and nothing else, you have SOME incentive to use it (might as well, right?!?). Even at free/slight incentive to move, people don't move a lot... Even if you don't penalize full attacks for movement... I think adding in any additional cost is probably the wrong way to go.

[MGuy]

I do not agree with Frank's assertion that you shouldn't be able to trade movement actions for power, accuracy, rider effects, defensive boons, etc. There are a lot of reasons why on a battlefield you might just not want to move and there's no reason why that lack of movement should go to waste.

There are a lot of times you'll WANT to move, but if moving has an additional opportunity cost, you might choose not to. If these rider effects are too good, people will feel like they can't move.

That doesn't mean you can't do them - but you have to balance them VERY CAREFULLY. In 3.x, running lets you move fast, but you lose your Dex and are very easy to hit. If moving at all was the equivalent of running, I don't think it'd happen at all. And if the bonus is insignificant, then tracking it is it's own pain.

I think the better option is to not provide any additional 'costs' to movement. If not moving causes you to 'lose' your move and nothing else, you have SOME incentive to use it (might as well, right?!?). Even at free/slight incentive to move, people don't move a lot... Even if you don't penalize full attacks for movement... I think adding in any additional cost is probably the wrong way to go.

I'm fine with people choosing not to move if they are in a position such that not moving is the optimal choice. Just getting people to want to move isn't necessarily my goal. In fact the choice between doing so and not doing so, and having that choice mean something, is actually exactly the dynamic I want to set up. There's no reason given for me to 'want' people to move. Frank's complaint was about boring, static, fields but that complaint is better answered in other ways and is a lot like the 'superman diplomacy' or 'everything has to be rolled' thing he's brought up in other threads. Just because Frank says X is bad doesn't mean anything to me other than Frank doesn't like it.

What I actually want, if I step back and think about it, is for choices to have dynamic effects. For tactical choices to have benefits, consequences, and to promote synergy between different move sets. Getting to move for free isn't necessarily a dynamic effect I care about by itself. It depends on the context. In 4e there was effectively no penalty for moving. This meant 'push 4' moves didn't really do anything because movement was so free the enemy would just move right back to you and still get everything relevant it had before. If, instead, by being pushed by 4 means you lose your potential rider effect this round this means that someone 'else' on your team is more likely to be encouraged to get battlefield control abilities that either will allow you to get a free move, stop the enemy from being able to pushing you, move the enemy back in front of you so you can do your thing, etc.

[Username17]

The big problem 4e's action economy has is the idea of there only being allowed one Reaction per round of turns (and no Reactions on your turn). As this limit ends up making threatened areas and shit largely pointless. No one ends up caring about the soft zones of control or whatever because the action economy keeps characters from being able to do anything about enemies flaunting their triggers. But the "Move, Minor, Standard" portion works really well and is incredibly clear terminology. There's no reason to confuse matters with 5e-like obfuscation.

What's a quick fix?

In Tenra Bansho Zero you get an 'infinite' amount of counter actions, the game designer says right out that's the method of dealing with hordes, you throw your hero into risk to get a counterattack against every little dude. Something like that seems good for the kind of imagery D&D has of Conan berserking through a boat and Drizzt berserking through a boat.

Final Fantasy Tactic's has reactive counters and it feels awesome to have your skillful knight get attacked by 3 dudes and counterstrike all of them.

Maybe it only activates if the target rolled an odd number to hit you, so it only happens 50% of the time, this seems less time consuming to me than tracking how many reactive abilities based on class level, DEX, magic and so on 20+ goblins have.

As jt points out, handing the active player stick around the table has a real time cost every time it's used. The optimal number of reactions declared per round of turns is zero.

As such, I cannot condone "reaction attacks" as the optimal solution for powerful fighters to chew through a pirate ship full of scut goblins. Really you want whirlwind attacks and blade rushes that do area damage for that purpose. If our swordmaster is to fell seven foes this turn, we'd rather that he did it on his own turn.

The best way for a Reaction to affect the game is for the threat of activation to change the tactical choices made. That way the existence of the Reaction has real consequences but you don't spend real table time resolving it. The issue with the 4e Reaction limit is that you end up hitting the limit constantly, which means that the reactions are used (and use table time) much more than the optimal zero times and also that you spend large portions of each round of turns with no ability to make further reactions and are thus having less than the ideal impact on enemy actions with threat of activation. This is more table time and less table impact than you'd want from your Reactions.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

What Frank said. You want them to matter so that positioning matters, but you don't want them to regularly trigger either. 4E D&D you had shit like Swordmages using up their Opportunity on Heavy Blade Opportunist AND Immediate Action Encounter Power several times a round and it was awful. 5E D&D has it so that some characters use their reactions almost every round, and it is also awful.

To that end, Attacks of Opportunity in 3E D&D (or any edition) honestly weren't powerful ENOUGH. Each one should've at least came with a damage multiplier per extra attack from your BAB.

[deaddmwalking]

To that end, Attacks of Opportunity in 3E D&D (or any edition) honestly weren't powerful ENOUGH. Each one should've at least came with a damage multiplier per extra attack from your BAB.

In our heartbreaker, if you're hit with an AoO, you have to make a save or lose your action. There are a lot of things that automatically provoke in 3.x that don't in our system (like tripping). If you FAIL to trip someone, you provoke an AoO, but in that case you've already performed your action so it's just damage. On the other hand, people are actually willing to try to trip people because if it works, they get a pretty hefty advantage. We don't offer a 5-foot step, so you can't just avoid AoO for doing things that are SUPPOSED to create them.

[pragma]

I like the idea of making opportunity attacks into zones/auras that Dean suggested above. I further like the idea of gating some of the options for your out-of-turn actions behind class because I don't like adjudicating very low damage AoOs from wizards.

You could imagine a type of action called Off-turn that ends your turn when you declare it. You could select your off-turn action from a menu of powers that you've unlocked, which might look like:
* Fighter anyone creature that leaves a threatened square has speed reduced to zero until start of their next turn.
* Barbarian: any creature that leaves a threatened square takes X damage of a type appropriate to your weapon.
* Wizard: you designate a creature as a counterspell target, and once before the start of your next turn you may make a counterspell attempt against it
... etc.

[Orca]

BTW, anyone know what sort of sales #2000 in books on Amazon means?

There's a calculator for that - https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-bo ... alculator/

The P2 core rulebook has a BSR of 2,532 right now. That means roughly 1330 sales per month. The special edition book is rank 52,469, for an estimated 88 sales per month. P2 released on August 1, so P2 has sold something around 3,300 core books on Amazon as of this writing.

Thanks for that. I got bogged down looking at other pages which told me less when trying to figure it out myself.

P2's had higher rankings (2020 when I asked) so I expect the cumulative total's more than 3300. The D&D 5e Player's Handbook was at 73 when I looked before, 98 now so it's utterly crushing P2 though.

[Username17]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Amazon dynamically dividing total Amazon Sales by Total Time on Amazon to get sales rank? Otherwise there would be a lot more volatility in the numbers. So if you sell a million books in a feeding frenzy in your first month and never sell any more, you don't drop directly from 1st to nine hundred millionth or whatever, it calculates you as having sold 500,000 copies per month the next month, and 333,333 copies per month the month after that and so on.

Now it should be remembered that sales ranks are dynamic and relative, so the number of books sold per month by the book at sales rank 100 this month won't be the same books sold per month of the book at sales rank 100 next month. I have legit no idea how stable those numbers are.

In any case 3-4 thousand books sold is a pretty reasonable number for an online RPG whose only justification for existence is to keep hope alive that there is "still support" for a gameline that used to be popular. Those are about the numbers that the Changeling 20th Anniversary kickstarter managed.

---

Regardless, the 3e thing where you could make an attack and then continue making attacks as part of a full attack or then move, or you could add a five foot step to a full round action and stuff... that was all bad. Confusing and bad. This was the clear case of people adding special cases to the rules to cover issues that came up in playtest. It was not elegant.

The 4e action system really is what the 3e action system looks like once someone has streamlined it. And that very much includes the Move action. The ability to spend a Move action on a Shift that pushes your model one square and doesn't provoke AoO or on a Move that pushes your model up to six squares but does provoke attacks is clear, concise, and definitely how you want things to work moving forward.

-Username17

[GâtFromKI]

Monster creation rules are out. I haven't read them yet.

It's only two months late - some genius thoughts underwater combat rules were more important than monster and NPC creation rules in the CRB.

Hurray, I guess?

... OH wait, it seems it's pure bullshit and the monster in the bestiary don't use the same values.

[Mord]

Regardless, the 3e thing where you could make an attack and then continue making attacks as part of a full attack or then move, or you could add a five foot step to a full round action and stuff... that was all bad. Confusing and bad. This was the clear case of people adding special cases to the rules to cover issues that came up in playtest. It was not elegant.

On the subject of full attacks - do you consider it a good idea to even have such a thing? I know that the concept of iterative attacks as it exists sucks, but if we assume an implementation where there's the same number of dice rolls either way, should there even be an alternative to the basic single attack that consumes multiple action types and does more damage?

[Foxwarrior]

The weird thing about trading movement for attacking more in 3rd is that the melee characters are the ones who trade the most, athletic people with swords trying to just stand there and flail away, while frail old people in heavy robes dance around the battlefield speaking gibberish and making powerful hand gestures.

[deaddmwalking]

On the subject of full attacks - do you consider it a good idea to even have such a thing? I know that the concept of iterative attacks as it exists sucks, but if we assume an implementation where there's the same number of dice rolls either way, should there even be an alternative to the basic single attack that consumes multiple action types and does more damage?

The benefit you fail to acknowledge with iterative attacks is, even though the implementation is bad, you get more chances to contribute on your turn.

If you have a +15/+10/+5 to hit, and are attacking an AC 22, you have a 70% chance, a 45% chance, and a 20% chance to hit (alternatively a 30%, 55%, and 80% chance to miss). The odds of missing on all three is only 1 in 6.

Having 1/3 of your combat rounds DO NOTHING is less satisfying than having 1/6 of your combat rounds do nothing.

Getting extra swings isn't necessarily a problem. Getting those extra swings and still being able to move is important. Replacing those extra swings with other abilities that provide options isn't a bad thing, either. Ie, if a martial character has a choice between making a 'dolorous blow' that deals 6d6 damage to one target, or a 'scything blade' that deals 3d6 to every target in reach. But if the warrior gets a single attack that misses 50% of the time and does 5% of an opponent's hit points if it hits, versus a wizard that does a single attack that does nothing 50% of the time but kills the opponent outright the other 50%, you still have a serious imbalance.

[Username17]

Regardless, the 3e thing where you could make an attack and then continue making attacks as part of a full attack or then move, or you could add a five foot step to a full round action and stuff... that was all bad. Confusing and bad. This was the clear case of people adding special cases to the rules to cover issues that came up in playtest. It was not elegant.

On the subject of full attacks - do you consider it a good idea to even have such a thing? I know that the concept of iterative attacks as it exists sucks, but if we assume an implementation where there's the same number of dice rolls either way, should there even be an alternative to the basic single attack that consumes multiple action types and does more damage?

One of the emergent things in 3e combat that is pretty cool and makes for a good tactical puzzle are enemies like Trolls and Girallon that have a very large difference between their attack action and their full attack action. The fact that optimal tactics involves doing hit and run stuff even when it involves getting smacked with attacks of opportunity is actually really great.

But it wouldn't be great if all enemies were like that, and the fact that a lot of greatsword wielding characters just genuinely don't have anything they can do to solve tactical problems like that is also an issue. The bottom line is that some characters and monsters should be able to use "Standard + Move" to do a super attack, but that this should be a special ability not a general part of the combat rules.

Similarly, I think a lot of people would be happier if some of the bigger magic attacks required "Standard + Move" so there was legit advantage to keeping enemies from being able to get into the Sorcerer's face.

-Username17

[Orca]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Amazon dynamically dividing total Amazon Sales by Total Time on Amazon to get sales rank? Otherwise there would be a lot more volatility in the numbers. So if you sell a million books in a feeding frenzy in your first month and never sell any more, you don't drop directly from 1st to nine hundred millionth or whatever, it calculates you as having sold 500,000 copies per month the next month, and 333,333 copies per month the month after that and so on.

The sales rank falls off with time, but from that page brized linked, sales for one day of X give the same sales rank as sales of 15X over a month would. Since months have more than 15 days no, it's not a simple division of sales over time. Another page I found displayed elegant decay curves for sales rank for back-list books where each individual sale shows up in the data. Dunno what their total sales are like; PF2's selling over 1200 copies a month on Amazon now vs. ~10 000 for the D&D 5e PHB is all that data shows.