Pathfinder Is Still Bad

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:39 pm

rasmuswagner wrote:PF design tenet: Core parts of your character's concept don't have to come in early, if they're things a Commoner couldn't do.

Unchained Summoner, Elemental subtype: If you want an elemental buddy, it gets Whirlwind/Vortex at level *20* (and fuck you Earth, you *never* gain Earth Glide).
Wildsoul (Arachnid) Vigilante: You are Spiderman. You can throw Tanglefoots bags - at level 6. You get a climb speed and the ability to shoot sticky rope - at level 12. You get "skyscraper flight" like Spiderman at level 18.

That's been a problem with PF since day one. The level 20 capstones are a joke, and should really come in somewhere between 6 and 9, depending on what they are. With killing joke coming in closer to 9, and even more better weapon specialization closer to 6.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Jan 12, 2017 5:38 am

So Archtype let you swap out different class features for other class features, sometimes working as a multiclass of sorts like "Vivisectionist Alchemist replaces Rogue".

I want to ask "Is there a consistency to how they value different class features" but I know the answer is "lol no".

Instead I'll ask y'all what class features you figure are roughly equal to each other. Just limited to levels 1-8.

Like alchemy bombs being traded for every-2-levels sneak attack seems alright. Mutagens being traded for every-4-levels sneak attack is more vague.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Jan 12, 2017 2:00 pm

The reason class abilities balance differently than points sysytems like shadowrun is because abilities synergize. If you aren't going to be making any attack rolls that give SA, SA is literally worthless, it's why various loops to get Wizard 3/PrC 17 that have basically full Rogue SA progression along with full Wizard Progression are not broken at all, and are in fact underpowered because you gave up PrC features that could have helped you casting.

So there can't be a "fair trade off chart" because fundamentally SA is worth more to a character making attack rolls for damage than a Wizard, and kiting abilities are worth more to a Wizard than a melee combatant.

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Thu Jan 12, 2017 6:30 pm

Kaelik wrote:The reason class abilities balance differently than points sysytems like shadowrun is because abilities synergize. If you aren't going to be making any attack rolls that give SA, SA is literally worthless, it's why various loops to get Wizard 3/PrC 17 that have basically full Rogue SA progression along with full Wizard Progression are not broken at all, and are in fact underpowered because you gave up PrC features that could have helped you casting.

So there can't be a "fair trade off chart" because fundamentally SA is worth more to a character making attack rolls for damage than a Wizard, and kiting abilities are worth more to a Wizard than a melee combatant.

And also, despite Kaelik being living proof that cancer can be transmitted through the internet, this post represents more knowledge and alytical thought than the entire PF core team is capable of.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jan 12, 2017 8:40 pm

The fundamental inability to fairly judge abilities against one another in a vacuum is a big reason why the Same Game Test happened. Your first aoe damage effect is a big deal, but your fourth aoe is basically meaningless. A bonus to attack or damage rolls is meaningful if and only if you have an attack that's good enough to use. And so on.

Your attacks and defenses matter as the sum of their parts. Not as individual parts.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Jan 14, 2017 7:01 pm

I tried building a couple kineticist characters for a friend's game. It was a painful experience. So many tedious special-snowflake rules for so little payoff.

An entirely new MP system coupled to unhealable nonlethal damage and a bunch of special switches and toggles for various resources. And what do you get? You throw a rock or an energy bolt. Maybe it explodes, or does a status effect. You get some passive bonuses for stabbing yourself before you start adventuring.

I guess it could be pretty decent for having low-end NPC "mage" mooks, but I am pretty frustrated that the rules for "you can throw a kinda level-appropriate energy blast" ended up at least five times more complicated and fiddly than necessary.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sat Jan 14, 2017 11:43 pm

Pretty much all the classes in Occult Adventures ended up more fiddly than necessary.

The simplest is the psychic, 'cause it's just a sorcerer with a few special snowflake abilities and new bloodlines. But the spell list (and particularly all the italics in it) pretty much gave me an aneurism. It was a list of shit from a half-dozen different books, and I had no desire to wade through them all to find the handful of things that actually work as solutions to common adventuring problems.

The medium can be fairly simple, too, but you have to have the insight that flipping between spirits to create effective builds isn't actually a thing it can do. You pretty much have to pick one thing to cheese out, and odds are other classes do that better. Though it is a useful thing to dip (with a feat tax) to gain an untyped bonus to all attack and damage rolls, which can be pretty useful if you're trying to force two weapon fighting to be viable despite every effort Paizo makes to kick you in the balls. But building something really useful is a huge hill to climb.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 5:20 am

https://pathminder.github.io/base-class ... unchained/

This, on the other hand, might be cool. They take pathfinder's Unchained rogue variant and apply two archetypes to it, one from Paizo, one from Dreamscarred's second Tome of Battle hack. All of it's stuff you can find on D20PFSRD, but I wasn't willing to go to the trouble of making all the substitutions myself.

You get level 6 spellcasting, level 6 martial maneuvers, no stupid rogue tricks, and a sneak attack progression that is way more focused on debuffs than damage.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 6:47 am

FrankTrollman wrote: A bonus to attack or damage rolls is meaningful if and only if you have an attack that's good enough to use. And so on.

-Username17

This is why it always hits me as really self-defeating when Shadowrun MCs get pissy about a player not taking a token number of points in skills that are largely voluntary in use. Nobody with any system savvy is going to start acting like they're Danny Ocean just because they bumped their Con pool from defaulting to 2 to rolling 4 and in fact that pool is still low enough that simple iterative probability will quickly defeat you if the MC starts asking for a ton of rolls just to prove a point. It's a situation where it's simply way less disruptive to hand out carrots to the characters that have good social skills instead of smashing the troll samurai with the biggest stick you can find.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:02 am

That's a fun to look at class with lots of interesting moving parts. The gambit refresh to maneuvers is interesting but seems needlessly fiddly, it kinda feels like it's there so people go "Look it used a SKILL check, this is NOT WEEABANMAGIC"
How does it compare to a ninja or vivisectionist alchemist?

So rogue tricks+uncanny dodge+slower sneak attack= 6th level casting in Paizo logic...

Sir Aubergine · Post by **Sir Aubergine** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 9:01 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:https://pathminder.github.io/base-class ... unchained/

This, on the other hand, might be cool. They take pathfinder's Unchained rogue variant and apply two archetypes to it, one from Paizo, one from Dreamscarred's second Tome of Battle hack. All of it's stuff you can find on D20PFSRD, but I wasn't willing to go to the trouble of making all the substitutions myself.

You get level 6 spellcasting, level 6 martial maneuvers, no stupid rogue tricks, and a sneak attack progression that is way more focused on debuffs than damage.

Kudos... this is the first time I have ever wanted to play a rogue using the Pathfinder rules (albeit, there is not much rogue left in that Frankenstein's monster of a build

) !

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 2:26 pm

OgreBattle wrote:That's a fun to look at class with lots of interesting moving parts. The gambit refresh to maneuvers is interesting but seems needlessly fiddly, it kinda feels like it's there so people go "Look it used a SKILL check, this is NOT WEEABANMAGIC"
How does it compare to a ninja or vivisectionist alchemist?

So rogue tricks+uncanny dodge+slower sneak attack= 6th level casting in Paizo logic...

It's third party. It's probably overpowered in paizo logic.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 3:03 am

Oh my fucking god: pathfailure detect evil dosen't detect evil. What manner of bullshittery is this?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 3:52 am

Voss wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:That's a fun to look at class with lots of interesting moving parts. The gambit refresh to maneuvers is interesting but seems needlessly fiddly, it kinda feels like it's there so people go "Look it used a SKILL check, this is NOT WEEABANMAGIC"
How does it compare to a ninja or vivisectionist alchemist?

So rogue tricks+uncanny dodge+slower sneak attack= 6th level casting in Paizo logic...
It's third party. It's probably overpowered in paizo logic.

The games I play in, they'll okay basically anything as long as it's in D20pfsrd. There's a surprising amount of 3rd-party stuff lurking there, sometimes almost completely unlabeled.

For instance, I think the Wyvaran metamagic favored class bonus that can combine with the metamagic discount traits for free Quicken at level 8 is from something 3rd-party. And maybe the racial option that lets Human Wizards get +10 or +12 to all skills due to poor wording.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 4:18 am

Hicks wrote:Oh my fucking god: pathfailure detect evil dosen't detect evil. What manner of bullshittery is this?

Is this about the fact it doesn't give an aura to evil creatures of 4HD or less or something?

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 7:33 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:
Voss wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:That's a fun to look at class with lots of interesting moving parts. The gambit refresh to maneuvers is interesting but seems needlessly fiddly, it kinda feels like it's there so people go "Look it used a SKILL check, this is NOT WEEABANMAGIC"
How does it compare to a ninja or vivisectionist alchemist?

So rogue tricks+uncanny dodge+slower sneak attack= 6th level casting in Paizo logic...
It's third party. It's probably overpowered in paizo logic.
The games I play in, they'll okay basically anything as long as it's in D20pfsrd. There's a surprising amount of 3rd-party stuff lurking there, sometimes almost completely unlabeled.

Given that website is independent of paizo, and advertises those 3rd party books, and offers to publishes whatever shit people send them... it isn't surprising at all. Especially as it's also a storefront. And has a patreon.

Whether or not it gets used in the set of 'games you play in' still doesn't say anything about Paizo or PF.

Oh my fucking god: pathfailure detect evil dosen't detect evil. What manner of bullshittery is this?

You're going to have to explain or provide links.

Do you mean that evil things that aren't undead, clerics or outsiders and are less than level 4 don't show up (or spells items with a Caster Level less than 5)? Does it matter?
Because that's the only major change from the 3.5 version I see.

I'm kinda comfortable not playing 'j'accuse' with every greedy merchant or goblin the party trips over.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 9:11 am

Yes, any evil creature under 5hd that is not undead, an outsider, or a Cleric isn't pinged by the paladin's evil-dar, which includes Vampiric mist, ettercaps, werewolfs/rats/others, ogres, and of course basically every npc Mook ever (road bandits, guild theives, pirate crews, and... fuck it just goes on).

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat Jan 21, 2017 11:07 am

Voss wrote: Given that website is independent of paizo, and advertises those 3rd party books, and offers to publishes whatever shit people send them... it isn't surprising at all. Especially as it's also a storefront. And has a patreon.

On a side note, fuck that guy. I left a negative review on his website after a disappointing purchase and he started flipping shit and sending nastygrams to my e-mail inbox. No attempt at customer service, just a rant about how terrible I was to give him a negative review. Probably my fault for wanting to support his website, lesson learned.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 12:28 pm

So if you just write a 20 level class they'll possibly host in on their site? Or does it have to be a complete pdf kinda thing

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Jan 21, 2017 3:10 pm

OgreBattle wrote:So if you just write a 20 level class they'll possibly host in on their site? Or does it have to be a complete pdf kinda thing

I assume it has to be a complete product, like a PDF that is sold on the Paizo store. Note that selling a PDF in the Paizo store is not a very high bar to reach.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Jan 25, 2017 9:40 pm

I was considering letting the players touch Paizo's attempt at arena combat, which honestly looks like the author had intended for the rules to be a set of rules for public speaking and decided to kitbash them into thinking it can recreate The Gladiator. Bonuses are fairly restricted, ranging from +0 to +12 for the near-epic gladiator, and encourage attempting to draw out the combat so you can get more chances to make a Performance check. Victory conditions for the combat vs performance aren't really correlated that well, which isn't the most intuitive situation. To top it off, if you & your two friends are thrown into the Colosseum to fight a Bloodwyrm, the crowd is likely going to hate you whether you win or lose.

Side note: the collective Perception skill of an audience of 300+ people is off the RNG of any single member, and even a crowd of schmuck commoners can readily track invisible combatants.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Thu Jan 26, 2017 12:36 am

Got the print version of Red Dawn up on DTRPG now. With a $2 discount, even. Came out pretty nice, but I can't say I'm impressed with the paper in their "premium colour" grade. Still, it looks slick as hell.

On sale now.

djelai · Post by **djelai** » Thu Jan 26, 2017 1:37 am

OgreBattle wrote:What're their worst errata decisions?

The FAQ on the mounted charge is pretty stupid as well => if your mount charges, the rider is charging too, so he can't spur his mount (wtf?!), use his bow, cast a spell, etc.

And my favorite:
"casting a spell or SLA is obvious even without component and physical manifestation because bad-wrong-fun"... but if you purchase the new splatbook we just released, you can totally do it and it will be cool.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:52 am

How many hit points should a +5 cloak of resistance have? It looks pretty likely that a wizard's getting sundered next game, and the numbers I'm getting are pretty ridiculous. Weapons and armor add +10 HP per point of enhancement, but 52 HP seems ridiculously high for a cloak. Then again, 1 or 2 HP and Hardness 0 means that your cloak's getting shredded super-easily.

I guess in Pathfinder, you can just cast Make Whole and get it back next round, so maybe I should assume that tertiary gear is mostly easy to break.

Axebird · Post by **Axebird** » Thu Jan 26, 2017 8:18 am

Make whole has a casting time of 10 minutes and only repairs magic items with a CL that's half yours or less. You could do it between fights at 10th level or higher, but I can't imagine the hassle of trading shots at each other's clothing at the start of every fight is going to make your game more fun.