Pathfinder Is Still Bad

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Archmage Joda
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Post by Archmage Joda »

saithorthepyro wrote:
Mord wrote:
Archmage Joda wrote:Ugh, that shapeshifter class just makes me angry. I want to play a shapeshifter, but all the paizo options for that just seem determined to suck goat anus, so I can't get my shapeshifter werewolf/beast boy/prototype/whatever on in pathfinder, because fuck me, I guess.
Is there a reason the plain-Jane Druid doesn't scratch that itch? :confused:
Well, first the Druid's wildshape doesn't come on till level 4, is limited in it's number of uses, and while I can't speak of any mechanical issues besides that (I'm sure there are some which people in this forum can talk about), some people want to just play a person who can change into an animal without the other druid features. Also because outside of Wild Shape, a Druid is a squishy frontliner. Which the new shifter is as well apparently.
Pretty much this. Druid doesn't get wild shape til level 4, and then can only do it once a day til 8, whereas if I'm a "shapeshifter", I want to be able to shapeshift more than once a day, and also I'd rather be able to spec more for shapeshifting, as opposed to the hodgepodge of other stuff a druid does. If I wanted to play a druid, I'll just play a druid and do nature magic, and wild shape is just another little bonus.
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saithorthepyro
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Post by saithorthepyro »

Voss wrote:Staying power is an interesting question (and something Paizo themselves doubt, given both the thinner release schedule and comments the developers made on their own forums)

On the one hand it shouldn't, but on the other hand Paizo breeds fanatics, and there isn't exactly anyone challenging them over market share.


--
As to equipment... I hate every part of it, the ilevels, the absurd prices, the pure junk that populates the list and even the way they organized the six pages of weapon charts. Organizing weapons by Cryo, Flame, Plasma and Uncategorized makes me want to punch someone in the face. And that's just the section for Two-handed Advanced melee weapons.

Why would they not organize weapons by level, and instead go with damage type, except NOT slashing, bludgeoning and piercing? What the actual hell?
It is a really bad way of organizing it. If they were going to do it by type, they could have done it by actual type (Rifle, Pistol, etc.) instead of damage type.

Could I get links to those statements? I'd like to check them out myself, but one of the reasons for a lack of confidence may be the fact that the design lead left, although that may turn out to be a good thing. Between this and Ultimate Wilderness I have no confidence for whatever comes in the future, although they might run out of design space anyway.
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Post by Voss »

Eh. I can't really provide links (plus I think the fencebuilder frowns on cross forum shitposting).

I was paying some attention to the Paizo forums for the game over the summer before it came out, then starting losing interest as it turned into pure fanwank for why it isn't as shit as it actually is.

I'm pretty sure some of them were in the first adventure path announcement post when they were justifying why they were
a) only doing AP releases for SF every two months rather than every month
and
b) reducing the page count of the AP (but not so much the price of the AP)

Though there are a couple other points as well, such as when they backed off on compatibility with starfinder (especially for classes), and when it turned out Alien Archive isn't a MM for starfinder, but some weird combo book of player options and enemy statblocks and some of the equipment cut from the main rules, which implicitly suggested to me that they were trying to boost the audience size and reduce risk that the book wouldn't sell.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

Voss wrote:Eh. I can't really provide links (plus I think the fencebuilder frowns on cross forum shitposting).

I was paying some attention to the Paizo forums for the game over the summer before it came out, then starting losing interest as it turned into pure fanwank for why it isn't as shit as it actually is.

I'm pretty sure some of them were in the first adventure path announcement post when they were justifying why they were
a) only doing AP releases for SF every two months rather than every month
and
b) reducing the page count of the AP (but not so much the price of the AP)

Though there are a couple other points as well, such as when they backed off on compatibility with starfinder (especially for classes), and when it turned out Alien Archive isn't a MM for starfinder, but some weird combo book of player options and enemy statblocks and some of the equipment cut from the main rules, which implicitly suggested to me that they were trying to boost the audience size and reduce risk that the book wouldn't sell.
They have plenty of room to cover in terms of cut equipment, since outside the ridiculously oversize weapons and armor lists (then only due to leveled equipment).

As for the idea raised that SF could be beta-testing what will be PF 2.0, I don't think that will ever happen. We already had Unchained as a beta-test for it, and as time goes on it seems more and more like people at Paizo either don't even think of change or are terrified of it from fear of alienating their forum fanbase.
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Post by Voss »

That I don't agree with. They're really dredging the bottom of the barrel for material, in much the same way WotC did with 3.0, 3.5 and 4th. All they really need is a Secretions of Blue Magic and Book of Eleven Swords to round out the Copypasta End Times.

All their new classes share the the same design space as old classes and clearly they've hit bottom with archetypes at this point. I fully expect a Gen Con release of PF 2.0 (Even More Backwards Compatible! But not really) in 2019 or 2020. Without an Open Playtest, which will speed things up (and cause extra paizo forum whinging)

They just don't have many more places to go except arcane ranger & arcane paladin hybrids, and would let them start their shitty splatbook cycles all over again.

They're seriously producing pocket editions (of books that mainly sell as pdfs) and have recently done a Pathfinder version of Its Wet Outside(Aquatic Adventures) and two different Horror campaign books (PFRPG: Horror Adventures and PF Campaign Setting: Horror Realms). That's how far down the cycle they are.
Last edited by Voss on Mon Nov 06, 2017 4:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

Voss wrote:That I don't agree with. They're really dredge the bottom of the barrel for material, in much the same way WotC did with 3.0, 3.5 and 4th. All they really need is a Secretions of Blue Magic and Book of Eleven Swords to round out the Copypasta End Times.

All their new classes share the the same design space as old classes and clearly they've hit bottom with archetypes at this point. I fully expect a Gen Con release of PF 2.0 (Even More Backwards Compatible! But not really) in 2019 or 2020. Without an Open Playtest, which will speed things up (and cause extra paizo forum whinging)

They just don't have many more places to go except arcane ranger & arcane paladin hybrids, and would let them start their shitty splatbook cycles all over again.

They're seriously producing pocket editions (of books that mainly sell as pdfs) and have recently done a Pathfinder version of Its Wet Outside(Aquatic Adventures) and two different Horror campaign books (PFRPG: Horror Adventures and PF Campaign Setting: Horror Realms). That's how far down the cycle they are.
True. But I can't see it being that much different from the current one, given how the current dev team does and what comes out. I see it probably being even worse.
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Post by Voss »

Eh. It depends what they do.

Moving away from spamming class based archetypes and dozens of traits in Starfinder was clearly a good move (though themes are kinda boring (take themeless, unless a really really specific ability absolutely matters) and the SF archetype system is a blatantly unfinished outline of a complete waste of space.

It does indicate a willing to move away from a source of easy filler for splatbooks.

What they really need to do, though, is sit down and look at the dozens of classes that fill the exact same design space, pick up a fucking machete and start chopping. All this time after Advanced Classes, and I still don't know what the fuck they were smoking when they decided they absolutely needed a fighter/cleric hybrid class. Because... paladins. And clerics.

Or two more variations of ranger.
Or another alchemist who was a shittier version of a rogue/alchemist than an alchemist.
Or another fighter variation (after cavalier), but was only for piercing weapons. Yeah, that needed to be an entire fucking class.

Honestly my main beef with starfinder is setting, equipment (mostly weapons and armor), spaceships and 3 out of the 7 classes (envoy, mystic and solarion).

There isn't any need to do that kind of damage scaling fuckery for PF 2, and spaceships are obviously not an issue. A 57% success rate on classes is huge fucking improvement for Paizo.

And frankly the mystic is easily fixed (ditch the weirdly forced themes, the terrible (even worse) lay on hands ability, and telepathy and give it selectable options like everyone else)

For the solarion, the trivial fix is... don't be a charisma class, set DCs and calculate resolve from Str or Dex like a soldier

For the envoy, the fix is chuck it. Admit the operative does everything better and move the handful of worthwhile tricks to other classes. Like the mystic, since the class description tells a terrible lie that the mystic is somehow a face class despite having nothing to support that role.
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Post by Slade »

Voss wrote:Eh. It depends what they do.

Moving away from spamming class based archetypes and dozens of traits in Starfinder was clearly a good move (though themes are kinda boring (take themeless, unless a really really specific ability absolutely matters) and the SF archetype system is a blatantly unfinished outline of a complete waste of space.

It does indicate a willing to move away from a source of easy filler for splatbooks.

What they really need to do, though, is sit down and look at the dozens of classes that fill the exact same design space, pick up a fucking machete and start chopping. All this time after Advanced Classes, and I still don't know what the fuck they were smoking when they decided they absolutely needed a fighter/cleric hybrid class. Because... paladins. And clerics.

Or two more variations of ranger.
Or another alchemist who was a shittier version of a rogue/alchemist than an alchemist.
Or another fighter variation (after cavalier), but was only for piercing weapons. Yeah, that needed to be an entire fucking class.

Honestly my main beef with starfinder is setting, equipment (mostly weapons and armor), spaceships and 3 out of the 7 classes (envoy, mystic and solarion).

There isn't any need to do that kind of damage scaling fuckery for PF 2, and spaceships are obviously not an issue. A 57% success rate on classes is huge fucking improvement for Paizo.

And frankly the mystic is easily fixed (ditch the weirdly forced themes, the terrible (even worse) lay on hands ability, and telepathy and give it selectable options like everyone else)

For the solarion, the trivial fix is... don't be a charisma class, set DCs and calculate resolve from Str or Dex like a soldier

For the envoy, the fix is chuck it. Admit the operative does everything better and move the handful of worthwhile tricks to other classes. Like the mystic, since the class description tells a terrible lie that the mystic is somehow a face class despite having nothing to support that role.
Yeah, I think Mystic was originally a Cha class but they realized that sucked and changed.
Ooh, maybe they flipped the source of Mystic and Solarian? That would explain why Solarian's Cha requirement feels so weird.
Last edited by Slade on Mon Nov 06, 2017 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

Some pieces have come in on the puzzle of why the Shifter is so bad from some posts by Mark Seifter on the subject. While he wasn't directly involved with the class, he does say that part of the intent was to cut down on the number of options in a class, since the devs felt the number of options were overwhelming players, with the case being number of options that people can transform into, which is why there are few transformation options for the Shifter. Personally I think that the bloat comes more often from Spells, Feats, and Traits than class features, but whatever.

Besides that, people in the product discussion are also stating that the class was designed for new players, which is why the class is so simple and lacking in complicated options, something I cannot find the source for so I have no idea if this is Paizo's stance on the subject or if fans are inventing excuses. Either way, what?

New players are either going by the books, which means they get the core rulebook, and if they want to go in more, they are much more likely to get the Advanced Player's Guide or Advanced Class Guide or even Unchained over Ultimate Wilderness, which is a niche book. Well, maybe not given how much content for everything they stuff inside them, but a new player is going to think it's a book to get if you really like Druid's or Rangers. They're more likely to pick up Ultimate Combat or Magic before Wilderness.

If they're doing this online, they're going to be looking at Core classes first. They're the most recognizable, iconic classes, and are at the top of the class list as well. Shifter, a Base class, is likely going to be something that they choose later once they do have experience at the game, and are perhaps curious, and even then there are plenty of classes

I could understand if Paizo or fans or both, whichever is the case, said this about the Fighter, that it doesn't have many options because it is there for new players. May not agree, but at least understand to a degree. But this is a niche class written in a splatbook that a new player getting a hold of and deciding to use before even any of the core classes is unlikely.
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Post by Orca »

They did look at core classes first - the unchained rogue did well, the unchained monk is hanging on, the unchained barbarian sank without a trace. The barbarian was the only one of those definitely simplified, the monk is simpler in that you don't need archetypes to make it at all playable, the rogue had options and complexity added.

While there are classes which were just too complex to do well (looking at you, shaman) there's a level of complexity which you need to make something appeal to the PF base.
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Post by Voss »

Well, if that's true at all, it might be a response to the Occult classes, which largely are too fucking complicated. The simplest is the psychic, a sorcerer with a couple extra moving parts.

They're rest are basically made of poorly arranged gibberish. Some aren't too bad after character creation, but getting there is like navigating a swamp at night. There is also the strong possibility at just failing to make something viable.

The fighter is a weird thing to bring into the discussion, because a fighter has way too much bullshit for a newbie- there is a reason people point new players to the slayer these days.
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Post by Voss »

So, apparently the Shifter is bad enough and generating enough backlash even from Paizo fanatics, that Paizo has banned talking about it for a week.
Paizo Customer Service wrote:Consider this a moratorium on discussing the shifter in this product discussion thread until Monday, November 20th.

Posts continuing to debate the shifter will be removed without warning or notice until that day. If you have feedback regarding this class, please feel free to spend this week and weekend honing your words or putting the class through its paces, but right now this topic is generating too much angst to keep this thread on track.

If you want to try to redesign the class, you can put that in the homebrew forum, if you have rolled up a Shifter and want feedback, you can bring that to the advice forum. But this thread is on an temporary enforced break from discussing the shifter.
Though the _real_ Paizo fanatics have decided that people shouldn't be leaving bad reviews for the book just because they don't like it, so several started giving it blank five star reviews.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

As someone who actually plays PF and has a copy of Ultimate Wilderness, I have to say that some of the criticism sounds like hyperbole.

But it isn't. Every single word is true. The book is really that bad.
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Post by Antariuk »

I don't care much about the Shifter, it was a safe bet from the beginning that this class would be shitty because the only times Paizo has ever managed to do martial classes without magics that don't utterly suck was when someone from the B-Team wrote an accidentally good archetype.

What did disappoint and anger me though ist that awful Discovery system. Apparently Pathfinder wan't complex enough and also needed more MMO mechanics, so now you can add a new meta-currency point system where PCs accumulate Discovery points by finding way signs and beating stupid skill checks. Those points can be spend to discover sites and features in the current region, but they are spend blind like in a bid - if the amount isn't sufficient, you get half back and maybe find something else, but the rest is gone. Also, some of the rules, such as that careful exploration guarantees at least one Discovery point per day but no points beyond that (WTF?). How all this is supposed to go together with the older exploration from Ultimate Campaign rules is beyond me, or why someone would do that to themselves or their players. Goddammit.
Last edited by Antariuk on Mon Nov 20, 2017 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Voss »

Antariuk wrote:I don't care much about the Shifter, it was a safe bet from the beginning that this class would be shitty because the only times Paizo has ever managed to do martial classes without magics that don't utterly suck was when someone from the B-Team wrote an accidentally good archetype.
Eh. It wasn't so much about being a power class as it was the concept- a pure shapeshifter that doesn't have to voltron itself together from a dozen shitty pieces spread throughout their fucking truckloads of releases.

It would even inherently be capable of getting shit like flight, movement shenanigans and various senses that are useful for adventuring problems, and various utility abilities that could be situationally useful.

Instead it has worse shape shifting than other classes and instead focuses on claw bullshit... which other classes also do better.

The impressive thing is the utter depth of failure. And then they doubled down on the failure with some customer service failure forbidding people to talk about it (the ban should be lifted now), and some gak that the reason it fails at every design goal is because it was designed to be noob friendly, so really it's an unqualified success.

Seriously, their current developer post is about the book, and can be paraphrased as 'words are bad, look at pretty pictures'
Last edited by Voss on Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Orca »

The ban in the product discussion thread has been lifted, but they're doing some very aggressive post policing. Including going back and removing more posts from the past few days from various threads that they didn't remove initially.

I'd wondered about the actual wilderness systems. There was very little mention of them besides a few people saying 'cool, they have weather generators' or similar. They're that bad?
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Post by Voss »

Orca wrote:The ban in the product discussion thread has been lifted, but they're doing some very aggressive post policing. Including going back and removing more posts from the past few days from various threads that they didn't remove initially.

I'd wondered about the actual wilderness systems. There was very little mention of them besides a few people saying 'cool, they have weather generators' or similar. They're that bad?
No idea. I haven't seen anyone (including Paizo) talk about them, but I might have missed the latter. I don't know that anyone gives a shit about their arcane systems for... perfectly normal things. It's just a way to pad page count, the same way Ultimate Intrigue had a shitty class, some archetypes, feats and spells, and half the book dedicated to incoherent ramblings on how to handle some spells and effects differently for social mayhem.

I honestly don't know what a 'wilderness system' would do.
Last edited by Voss on Tue Nov 21, 2017 6:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

@Voss: While I don't doubt they're removing posts, they haven't touched any of mine yet. Maybe they just didn't get to them yet, because I wasn't kind to that piece of crap class.

Also, while the blank five-star reviews are annoying for existing, the page-long ones are even worse and seem to be trying to build a blasted wall to bounce any criticism off of.
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Post by Antariuk »

Voss wrote: I honestly don't know what a 'wilderness system' would do.
The basic idea seems to be that the players should have a way of buying their exploration success instead of wandering around aimlessly, but the way it's set up feels very artificial. If you gather enough points from decoding way signs or declaring the exploration action for the day, you can try to unlock access to whatever it is you're looking for (see the bet I mentioned before) - which puts a lot of work on the GM to let your actions somehow feel relevant and connected to the actual discovery, because why else would you even use a discovery system? As an added bonus, the GM's prep time explodes like crazy because you need to set up all the way signs and determine the Discovery point seeds.

And because this wasn't all bad enough, there is an example writeup of a territory to be explored with the new system, and suddenly you see an entry named "Reconnaissance via Flight" - which is hilarious because the only time flying came up so far was as a possible trigger condition for discovering a way sign, not an actual site or something. That entry reads: "A character who spends at least 30 minutes flying above the region and then succeeds at a DC 20 Perception check spots landmarks and gets the lay of the land." Which is unhelpful at best, because that doesn't refer to anything said before (landmarks are not specified as a thing in these mechanics), or how it might modify or ease the exploration process.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

Voss wrote:I honestly don't know what a 'wilderness system' would do.
As a GM, I'd pay money for a system for generating weather on a national scale that adjusted for terrain and produced plausible results. Something that could produce "it was storming in Sardina on Tuesday, so there is rain here in Auvignon on Thursday." It wouldn't have to be perfect, just reasonably plausible and fast.

Of course, producing something like that would require a level of research, design, playtesting, and attention to detail that I do not believe Paizo is capable of producing, so even if someone told me that Ultimate Wilderness had such a system, I wouldn't believe them.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I don't care much about the Shifter, it was a safe bet from the beginning that this class would be shitty because the only times Paizo has ever managed to do martial classes without magics that don't utterly suck was when someone from the B-Team wrote an accidentally good archetype.
What would that be? There's a slayer with shadow images that comes to mind
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Post by Antariuk »

OgreBattle wrote: What would that be? There's a slayer with shadow images that comes to mind
The Stygian Slayer? Combined with Sniper, that makes a decent combo for a ranged build.

I'm not up to date on PF, or which archetypes are still good with alle the FAQs flying around, but I remember the Daring Champion archetype for the Cavalier being pretty neat for a Dex/Cha build, especially as a 4-level dip.
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Post by virgil »

Just noticed this annoying nerf Pathfinder gave to ghost sound
added text to the spell wrote:Anyone who hears a ghost sound receives a Will save to disbelieve
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Post by erik »

virgil wrote:Just noticed this annoying nerf Pathfinder gave to ghost sound
added text to the spell wrote:Anyone who hears a ghost sound receives a Will save to disbelieve
Nerf? In 3.5 it is save if interacted with... and I do not know how you interact with a sound other than by hearing it. If anything this is an improvement since it is more clear and ghosts know illusion rules could use more clarity.

Edit. I guess it would help to know if you just get one save. Or one every time you hear it. But that isn't clear in either edition.
Last edited by erik on Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

Antariuk wrote:What did disappoint and anger me though ist that awful Discovery system. Apparently Pathfinder wan't complex enough and also needed more MMO mechanics, so now you can add a new meta-currency point system where PCs accumulate Discovery points by finding way signs and beating stupid skill checks. Those points can be spend to discover sites and features in the current region, but they are spend blind like in a bid - if the amount isn't sufficient, you get half back and maybe find something else, but the rest is gone. Also, some of the rules, such as that careful exploration guarantees at least one Discovery point per day but no points beyond that (WTF?). How all this is supposed to go together with the older exploration from Ultimate Campaign rules is beyond me, or why someone would do that to themselves or their players. Goddammit.
The way I see it, it's less of an MMO thing and more trying to abstract out overland travel. My thinking is that if you can hang mechanics off of travel, by it having actual rules of some sort, you can do more stuff with it.

How this book handles it is... pretty terrible. Are there any examples out there of it being done well?
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