Pathfinder 2e

[MGuy]

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.

I'm not so sure that the casters are exactly dancing around the battlefield so much as they may move if they might be threatened directly but otherwise just stand around casting. There was a panel little joke in gitp comic where a big caster battle was just two clerics standing in front of each other casting death spells. I don't see too many casters being especially mobile in play until they are directly threatened so the scene in most games is actually melee people trying to run into the enemies or stand between them and the old guy while the old guy waggles their eyebrows before shuffling away from anything trying to thwack them. Maybe rogues are flipping about but if casters can cast and don't have a reason to move they usually just don't.

[magnuskn]

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.

I'm not so sure that the casters are exactly dancing around the battlefield so much as they may move if they might be threatened directly but otherwise just stand around casting. There was a panel little joke in gitp comic where a big caster battle was just two clerics standing in front of each other casting death spells. I don't see too many casters being especially mobile in play until they are directly threatened so the scene in most games is actually melee people trying to run into the enemies or stand between them and the old guy while the old guy waggles their eyebrows before shuffling away from anything trying to thwack them. Maybe rogues are flipping about but if casters can cast and don't have a reason to move they usually just don't.

Totally depends on the spells you are using. My Sorcerer I'm playing at the moment is using Dragon's Breath (either a 60 feet line or 30 feet cone) as his main attack spell, so I constantly have to reposition myself. Not to mention that my GM is very good at coming after the character, so I also have to take care very often to not get smacked in the face too often by irate enemies.

BTW, if you are not aging up your casters on purpose, they tend to be just a few years older than the other characters in the group. Spontaneous casters tend to be the same age, actually.

[brized]

Yeah, that tool definitely isn't perfect, but it gives a ballpark. If it reduces uncertainty, it's useful.

[Kaelik]

if you have Close and Medium Range spells you are probably going to be wanting to move to set those up, and you also are probably going to want to move every turn to be as far as you can be from the melee threats.

[souran]

Honestly, the use of mini's leads to fairly static battlefields once people get into the fighting position they want. I have a hard time justifying the expense and time for how little difference it makes.

I get more dynamic and dramatic "movement" when I provide a picture of a room and run the combat TOTM than I do when I put down a map with squares. I think its a human nature issue as opposed to something that can really be fixed with rules.

[Iduno]

Honestly, the use of mini's leads to fairly static battlefields once people get into the fighting position they want. I have a hard time justifying the expense and time for how little difference it makes.

Are both sides moving? Because if monsters are stationary, that will give the PCs one single optimal place to stand and fight. Battletech and x-com both have movement on a board, and even after close combat starts, both sides are moving around (less than when they're hunting each other, but still moving constantly).

Maybe having terrain features that protect you help in both of those games? Or facing (you don't want to get shot in the back in either game).

[Omegonthesane]

For XCOM in particular (and also probably X-Com, idk) it also helps that you have range bonuses/penalties to shooting, so you're specifically incentivised to actually move.

[maglag]

For XCOM in particular (and also probably X-Com, idk) it also helps that you have range bonuses/penalties to shooting, so you're specifically incentivised to actually move.

In most XCOM the players move as little as possible while overwatching all the time.

It's only when there's some time limit that people move more to try to get to the objective before it's too late, otherwise it's plain more efficient to hug cover and crawl forward as slowly and safely as possible, ranged penalties/bonus be damned.

[Dean]

I disagree. Once firefights break out you move a lot searching out sight lines. You always move from cover to cover and never from better cover to worse cover but you still move around a lot until very high levels when snipers and heavy plasma's can reach halfway across the map without much accuracy loss.

It's only before fighting that you want to inch across the map one square at a time overwatching the whole way. And that's more a fault of the new X-com's discovery system than the combat system. In the original aliens were just coming for you and taking their turns way before you knew they were there, so it was advantageous to find them on your terms.

[SlyJohnny]

In the original aliens were just coming for you and taking their turns way before you knew they were there, so it was advantageous to find them on your terms.

But not on the very first turn, because then they had full time units and their reaction shots were boosted.

[Kaelik]

When I originally played it the new X-COM well I guess the new X-COM 2 I didn't play the new X-COM 1, it had punishing turn limits for every mission so bad that you had to double move every single turn without fail until combat started, then move maximum movement and fire until you got the main objective and then sometimes you STILL ran out of time because you were supposed to double move and not shoot while a bunch of aliens where shooting at you.

I disabled the SHIT out of those time limits immediately and then creeping from cover to cover became actually fun.

[Whipstitch]

I disagree. Once firefights break out you move a lot searching out sight lines.

It really depends on the difficulty level. On Normal and Classic you have a fair amount of freedom to flank and such but on Impossible the spawns can be dense enough that things can snowball on you extremely quickly if you activate a second pod while engaged with the first one. There's even a mechanic where breaking line of sight with previously engaged enemies cause all pods on the map to start converging on you. So consistently winning campaigns on Ironman Impossible is super unfun from months 2 to 4 since it typically involves lobbing an ungodly numbers of explosives in EW or metagaming spawn behavior and understanding when it is best to outright sacrifice a non-essential soldier in order to drop an alien without revealing additional tiles or giving them enough time to flee. Eventually you have the squad size and the scouting tools to start playing more freely, but it's in no way something that comes attached to your starting kit.

So, yeah, don't play Impossible Ironman. Tis a silly mode.

[OgreBattle]

so in MMA, boxing and so on, putting someone against the corner is usually to your advantage as they can't keep on back pedaling to avoid hits.
It can also be to your advantage if you have a wall to lean on as a bugbear is trying to grapple you to the ground.

In D&D and Pathfinder though there's really no penalty to being against a wall or standing in place.

Here's a basic guide to cornering someone in the ring:
https://www.expertboxing.com/how-to-cut-off-the-ring

And here's a silly multi-man MMA fight in an obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4xzs2besWk

I don't know exactly how to stick that in PF/DnD though, but having something as common as a wall affect combat will make combat more movement oriented.

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

[Omegonthesane]

The one time I threw a squad of Jesters against the party, the NPCs encountered difficulties due to walls.

The 3.Tome Jester has a "power slide" feature where it can literally move away from someone who just did them damage in order to reduce that damage, but when it came up they slid into a web.

But that doesn't cover a melee fighter pressing forward in real time.

(I used a lot of shotguns in XCOM and this may have skewed my tactics. Still surprised it took me so long to even consider using the sniper upgrade of "you can fire your giant rifle on the move at fucking all instead of being able to 360 noscope given LoS")

[jt]

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

The combo of:
[*] Basic melee attacks push 1
[*] Forced movement provokes AOOs
[*] Forced movement into walls and such deals damage
Is a fast track to some very fancy little tactical puzzles. You could strip that down to a game with the rules density of checkers and have a fun time.

[maglag]

I disagree. Once firefights break out you move a lot searching out sight lines. You always move from cover to cover and never from better cover to worse cover but you still move around a lot until very high levels when snipers and heavy plasma's can reach halfway across the map without much accuracy loss.

As pointed out activating a second pod can easily be deadly on anything higher than normal (or mods like long war), and indeed late game you simply have so much dakka that you can just blow up all the cover along any aliens hiding behind it.

It's only before fighting that you want to inch across the map one square at a time overwatching the whole way. And that's more a fault of the new X-com's discovery system than the combat system. In the original aliens were just coming for you and taking their turns way before you knew they were there, so it was advantageous to find them on your terms.

Find some nice cover, bunker up, overwatch the aliens as they come out of their own cover, those were the most advantageous terms in the older games. It was aliens who bunkered up themselves that were more of problem, and then it was a matter of destroying their cover.

Late game it was a matter of having your psionic corps stay in starting area and never move mind-controling the aliens from a safe distance.

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

The combo of:
[*] Basic melee attacks push 1
[*] Forced movement provokes AOOs
[*] Forced movement into walls and such deals damage
Is a fast track to some very fancy little tactical puzzles. You could strip that down to a game with the rules density of checkers and have a fun time.

In the LoTR tt game enemies hit in melee are pushed back, but if there's not enough room to be pushed back they take more damage instead so setting up surrounds is really important, and if you don't then stuff keeps moving.

[MGuy]

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

The combo of:
[*] Basic melee attacks push 1
[*] Forced movement provokes AOOs
[*] Forced movement into walls and such deals damage
Is a fast track to some very fancy little tactical puzzles. You could strip that down to a game with the rules density of checkers and have a fun time.

I think being pushed into a wall should make you flat footed if it's coming from just your basic attack. 1 square of movement probably isn't going to generate damage you care about.

[Stubbazubba]

so in MMA, boxing and so on, putting someone against the corner is usually to your advantage as they can't keep on back pedaling to avoid hits.
It can also be to your advantage if you have a wall to lean on as a bugbear is trying to grapple you to the ground.

In D&D and Pathfinder though there's really no penalty to being against a wall or standing in place.

Here's a basic guide to cornering someone in the ring:
https://www.expertboxing.com/how-to-cut-off-the-ring

And here's a silly multi-man MMA fight in an obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4xzs2besWk

I don't know exactly how to stick that in PF/DnD though, but having something as common as a wall affect combat will make combat more movement oriented.

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

Cham talked about this in 2017.

It's one of the core mechanics of wargames that I took for this concept.

In short, yes, someone should move after each melee attack, and the incentive to back someone into a wall has to be big enough to justify trying to arrange that over several rounds.

[OgreBattle]

Thanks will give that a read through.

These fencers also experimented with "D&D static 5ft combat":
https://imgur.com/gallery/sT0EVJi

longswords are already crossed at that range, daggers have room for footwork though.

[MGuy]

so in MMA, boxing and so on, putting someone against the corner is usually to your advantage as they can't keep on back pedaling to avoid hits.
It can also be to your advantage if you have a wall to lean on as a bugbear is trying to grapple you to the ground.

In D&D and Pathfinder though there's really no penalty to being against a wall or standing in place.

Here's a basic guide to cornering someone in the ring:
https://www.expertboxing.com/how-to-cut-off-the-ring

And here's a silly multi-man MMA fight in an obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4xzs2besWk

I don't know exactly how to stick that in PF/DnD though, but having something as common as a wall affect combat will make combat more movement oriented.

Perhaps 'forced movement' should be the standard, when two characters are engaged in melee one of them will be hit or pushed back or both

Cham talked about this in 2017.

It's one of the core mechanics of wargames that I took for this concept.

In short, yes, someone should move after each melee attack, and the incentive to back someone into a wall has to be big enough to justify trying to arrange that over several rounds.

Interesting read. It's weird how similar the rules for Engaging people you wrote here are to the idea I wrote up for myself last year.

[Thaluikhain]

In the LoTR tt game enemies hit in melee are pushed back, but if there's not enough room to be pushed back they take more damage instead so setting up surrounds is really important, and if you don't then stuff keeps moving.

Notably, pushing people away means that they aren't locked in combat until someone wins, if they win priority they can run away without any ill effects and if they have higher movement, not get caught that turn. Not sure if you'd want to adopt that, though.

[Iduno]

I disagree. Once firefights break out you move a lot searching out sight lines. You always move from cover to cover and never from better cover to worse cover but you still move around a lot until very high levels when snipers and heavy plasma's can reach halfway across the map without much accuracy loss.

It's only before fighting that you want to inch across the map one square at a time overwatching the whole way. And that's more a fault of the new X-com's discovery system than the combat system. In the original aliens were just coming for you and taking their turns way before you knew they were there, so it was advantageous to find them on your terms.

Yeah, I forgot there were newer games.

And agreed with SlyJohnny on the first turn. That wasn't great game design.

[Suzerain]

Seems that this game is totally dead on arrival. The Pathfinder subreddit barely discusses it, for one, and cursory looks at RPGnet or GitP reveal no discussion. For another, the Amazon listing has it behind a few "LitRPG" e-books, various Minecraft and Nintendo books at #42 in it's category.

The only places I checked that had positive discussion on it were ENWorld and of course the Paizo forums, and even there it was as contentious as those places are likely to allow. Of course, these are places where you can't call shit design shit design, so negative discussion would naturally be limited.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

If Paizo's smart, they'll hire some prominent voice actor or someone with "nerd cred" to run flashy railroaded games with high production values and put it on Youtube. If they're really smart, they'll make a new channel for it so that people don't automatically associate it with corporate stoogery. If they're really really smart, they'll hire at least one person who is also sexy in front of the camera.
Fuck the game though, am I right?

[angelfromanotherpin]

If Paizo's smart, they'll hire some prominent voice actor or someone with "nerd cred" to run flashy railroaded games with high production values and put it on Youtube.

The problem is that while that sort of thing works for 5e, which despite its flaws is genuinely simple and accessible, PF2 is a byzantine clusterfuck. If the webshow puts the system's user-unfriendliness on display, it'll discourage potential customers. If they polish up the turd for primetime and obfuscate how bad it is, they'll hard lose the expectations game with anyone they do convince to buy. Neither of those is a positive outcome.