Pathfinder 2e

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Darkholme
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Pathfinder 2e

Post by Darkholme »

So, as we know, the new edition playtest has dropped.

The design choices are ... interesting.

On a cursory read, it seems better than 5e, and better than PF1 in at least a few areas. Like, you're gonna have level appropriate features, 'cause there's no multiclassing, just archetypes.

I like the modular class features.

I don't like the skill math. the difference between 'untrained' and 'legendary' is only "+25% and the legendary guys can take feats to expand skill functionality".

I haven't read through spells yet, but casters get similar regular class features to noncasters plus a 9-level fullcaster progression.
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Post by Juton »

Against my better judgement I read some of it. The most interesting thing, make that 'interesting' choice is you can buy up to 8th level spells with feats. What should happen, when Paizo notices that everyone is taking Wizard casting, is they make a concerted effort to balance the game. What will happen is they remove those feats.

At first glance the expert/master/legendary system looks lame. In the old Pathfinder Fighters got to have big numbers. In Pathfinder 2.0 they don't even have that.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Juton wrote:What will happen is they
They're going to make it easier for a dedicated class to go all-in with casting, then penalize dipping for anyone else because balance is a warrior who swords and nothing else.
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Post by Darkholme »

Juton wrote:Against my better judgement I read some of it. The most interesting thing, make that 'interesting' choice is you can buy up to 8th level spells with feats.
I kind-of think that's a good idea. I like it. I just wish the noncasters had more power baked in by default.

A Wizard who Archetypes fighter is gonna be better than a Fighter who Archetypes wizard, IMO.
Juton wrote:What should happen, when Paizo notices that everyone is taking Wizard casting, is they make a concerted effort to balance the game. What will happen is they remove those feats.
Probably. If they do, I'll likely add them back in and make my own 'loosely based on PF2 system' if I find I like the rest of it more than PF1 and D&D5.
Juton wrote:At first glance the expert/master/legendary system looks lame. In the old Pathfinder Fighters got to have big numbers. In Pathfinder 2.0 they don't even have that.
I like the *Idea* behind it, but I don't like the execution. The proficiency ranks don't matter enough, and character level matters too much.
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Post by Axebird »

"Good idea, bad execution" is basically Paizo's tagline.
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Post by Darkholme »

Shared failing for both 5e and PF2

You don't want a massive accuracy gap for a given level in to-hit / defenses, so they make those things tightly grouped.

But you DO want a bigger accuracy gap (and a higher starting bonus) for skills.

Like, in PF1e, Your good skills were at level+5. And that works well enough. But if you make your bad skills only 25% lower, then on anything but the toughest DC, there's minimal difference between a rogue sneaking and a barbarian sneaking. For skills you want more than a 25% gap. you want at least a 50% gap.

IE: It's a terrible idea to use the same proficiency math for attacks, saves, and skills. Skills should be separate.
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Post by tussock »

Stat generation is a really complicated way of putting 18/16/14/12/10/8 wherever you want and limits your story background to do it.

The character build system in general is a piece-wise version of their PF1 archetypes, split into mix-and-match feats that you'll probably just follow the old chain anyway because they Voltron a bit. Easier to get started I guess, harder to look up.

Oh, still archetypes that replace your class feats, for multiclassing and pclasses. OK, and class feats are the non-crap ones, so use them for non-crap stuff. Bit of work to dig through for combos, but ah well, so is PF1.

Grappling is Athletics. Grapple titans, no trouble, just doesn't do much.

Wish they'd put the skill feats under the skills, like, obvious, right? The ones working for multiple skills at the start of the skill chapter. Class feats under Class, Skill feats under, Feats? Bah. I guess that's all you take with general feat slots anyway, seeing as the general feats are particularly crap.


Woo, it's a silver economy. Yay for things being reasonable.


Hit point scaling on the monsters is huge. Ogre 60hp at CR 3. CR 14 monsters are like 350+. Even if the PCs actually hurt that, it's not a fucking computer, don't make people do three digit arithmetic on five different totals while playing tabletop.

Not to mention, everything is +level, so, +31 vs AC 42, why not smaller numbers? Like, level 1 mobs are +5 to hit or more, that could all be lower, and probably a lot closer together. All the base gear has smaller bonuses to suit, +6 for plate. Hmm, need that though, and all the magic boosts.

--

What a huge mess, that shit is exhausting and, oh, the rules are in the back. OK, 130 pages to go, this is fine.

Can't die with a Hero Point left, so save one and never die. META-GAME CURRENCY! Oh, right, suck GMs toes for Hero Points. 2 points if he's got old socks on, and then again next week because they don't keep. You'll pry my lone free Hero Point out of my dying hands, you bastards.

That attack at -10 seems a colossally bad idea. That will crit fail all the time, forever. Find something else to do with action number 3. I think everyone wants a huge stack of shields, cart full, because that's not a bad thing to do with it, at least early on. Maybe magic stuff later, not sure on how to combo best, so many words.

750 damage from falling, eh. That's, uh, that's gunna kill everything. DC 15 save if someone falls on you, so sadly can't kill dragons by dropping peasants on them, usually.

Mounts are terrible. Burn a feat to be +1 AC and -2 Ref saves. How about not.

Uh, exploration mode is ... two pages, uh, sort of a rule for infinite cantrips, really, as part of determining what state you start combat in. Functional but is not 1/3 of 430+pg game. Clarified under GMing that you use the skill for init that you used while starting the fight, or Perception if it's at all debatable, always GM ruling.

DEAD: You are no longer alive. <- mate, I know the feeling, reading this.

Scratching runes off things makes it 90% cheaper to scratch them onto other things. OK, then. That is a rule, just not sure what's going on there. Seems like enchanted gems might have been a better concept for that. I guess they wanted to re-use art.

--

Finished! Still have no idea if it works. Gotta say, those guys work much harder than Mike Mearls does, that is a shit-tonne of words and actual rules and obvious questions about them actually seem answered.

Like Stealth is, uh, there's rules, they seem complete, lots of corner cases covered, and ... sort of a bunch of coin flips to avoid combat with it depending on people guessing stuff. Fair enough. Everyone trains Perception anyway, so yeah.

The bonuses are tiny outside the magic items, key stats hardly move, +1 for gear on stats, looks like it's a knife edge balance thing like 4e D&D where your actions either stay on the bonus treadmill (which actually jumps at times to account for items getting into cost range!!!) and things work or sudden critical fails everywhere and nothing works.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

The book looks like an IKEA set with no manual : lot and lot of elements, but no clear view about how they go together. Complete with some pieces that don't fit with any other piece.


Example : counterspell.

There's a level 1 wizard feat to counterspell (p 139). It's a reaction, with trigger "a creature casts a spell that you have prepared." There's no indication about how you identify a spell being cast. So you look at the description of the arcana skill (p 145), there's no reaction for identifying a spell being cast. There's nothing either about identifying a spell being cast in the Casting spells section of the spell chapter (p 195). So it's automatic, the MC has to say which spell is being cast ?...

... That's until someone takes the feat Recognize spell (p 170). It's a reaction, that allow you to recognize a spell being cast. So you need a feat to identify a spell being cast and use a counterspell. And a reaction.

... Except you can use only one reaction per turn. Even if you have several reactions per turn, you can use only 1 reaction on any given trigger (p 422) (this rule about "1 reaction per trigger" isn't stated p 7 in the section about reactions, but it's stated in the glossary p 422 for some reason).

Hence I have no idea how you can counter a spell. It may work if you convince every other player not to look at the Recognize spell feat and convince your MC he has to say the spell that is being cast.


And the whole book looks like this: you never know where to look for a given rule (seriously, why is the rule about identifying a spell being cast in the feat chapter, and not in the spell chapter ?), and the different pieces don't fit together. I can't find the rules about two-weapon fighting - except as feats for fighters and rangers. So i guess a rogue can't have a two-weapon build, or maybe there's a special rule hidden somewhere ? Casting a spell every round during 10 minutes makes you fatigued, except if the spell is Detect magic for some unknown reason. Grapple is described in the skill chapter while Arrest a fall (a usage of Acrobatics if you have a fly speed) is described in the combat chapter. A 15-feet jump is auto-success as described p 308, while a 16-feet jump is DC 21 as described p 147 (...yes, there are 150 pages between the rules for a 15-feet jump and the rules for a 16-feet jump. That's insane). Arcana is described as "how much you know about alchemy" (p 145), but identifying an alchemical item uses Craft (p 148). Powers that aren't spells are described in the Spell chapter - although those are specific to one class, and every feat specific to one class is described is the corresponding class. When you look at a spell, you have no idea who can cast it - you have to look at the spell list section, but the former doesn't doesn't have a summary of the effect of the spell. Orichalcum can (p 355) can be etched a speed rune at half-cost, but since you can then transfer the rune... Oh, look, I stopped caring about all those function calls (to understand "orichalcum", you have to look at "etching" 15 pages latter, which refers you to "craft" more than 200 page before, which refers you to "craft formula" which is... somewhere, i guess ?)

tussock wrote:Finished! Still have no idea if it works. Gotta say, those guys work much harder than Mike Mearls does, that is a shit-tonne of words and actual rules and obvious questions about them actually seem answered.
... I wouldn't say "actual rules". But yes, there is actual work, P2 isn't "vaporware" the way D&D5 is.

But, you know, it's more like the set of houserules of your favorite MC : he explains it and you can't understand any word he's saying, he gives you his manuscript notes and you don't know where to begin and none of this makes sense, and finally you play with him and everything runs smoothly and is consistent. So you guess there's a lot of work on his houserule, but he isn't able to explain anything about it and you wouldn't qualify his notes as "actual rules".
Last edited by GâtFromKI on Fri Aug 03, 2018 3:11 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by Slade »

Darkholme wrote:Shared failing for both 5e and PF2

You don't want a massive accuracy gap for a given level in to-hit / defenses, so they make those things tightly grouped.

But you DO want a bigger accuracy gap (and a higher starting bonus) for skills.

Like, in PF1e, Your good skills were at level+5. And that works well enough. But if you make your bad skills only 25% lower, then on anything but the toughest DC, there's minimal difference between a rogue sneaking and a barbarian sneaking. For skills you want more than a 25% gap. you want at least a 50% gap.

IE: It's a terrible idea to use the same proficiency math for attacks, saves, and skills. Skills should be separate.
Yeah, only difference in skills is the gates.
With Master feat you can now do this.

Kind of wish there was an innate benefit as well (besides the +X).

Hide is actually a decent armor now...I'm actually impressed.
Last edited by Slade on Fri Aug 03, 2018 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Axebird »

The skills are fucked in several ways. They're extremely limited in what you can do with them, require you to intentionally spend actions for basic things (like "Recall Knowledge" and the aforementioned fiasco with identifying spells), and having almost all DCs generated on the spot by the GM based on how hard he things the task should be. But even worse than all that:
Sometimes using a skill in a specific situation might require you to have a higher proficiency rank than what is listed on the table. For instance, even though a high-level barbarian untrained in Arcana could reliably use Arcana to Recall Knowledge regarding the breath weapons of the various colors of dragons, the GM might decide that Recalling Knowledge about the deeper theories behind magical energy of a dragon’s breath weapon might be something beyond the scope of the barbarian’s largely utilitarian and anecdotal knowledge about how to fight dragons. The GM decides whether a task requires a particular proficiency rank, from trained all the way up to legendary.
There's an entire extra axis on skill checks, where the GM is supposed to arbitrarily decide what proficiency level you're supposed to have to be allowed to even attempt the check. This is awful, considering you can only ever have 1-3 skills at the level appropriate proficiency level: 1 at levels 3, 7, and 15; 2 at levels 5, 9, and 17, and 3 at levels 13 and 19. It doesn't matter how many skills you get trained (rogues get 10+Int skills trained at level 1, but you don't actually care much), you only get a small handful of skills that matter regardless of your class.
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Post by tussock »

You get four stat boosts each time so you can boost all your saves and your key class stat and no one falls off the bonus track, in fact, everyone gets closer together on defences over time as the low starting stats catch the high ones.

But attacks move apart. You totally have to use the thing your class boosts up, I doubt that multiclassing stuff works, just don't have the bonuses.

--

Skills though, proficiency rank is sort of the only way to give any spotlight time to particular characters. They don't crit the same, not the 3rd attack to chase.

Like, even if the Rogue makes his Master skill check, he's only +4 over untrained people, maybe +6 total on Dex, and so the other three characters in the party combined would succeed more often than the Rogue.

--

Bonus to hit (or AC) in combat is huge. Like, with reliable crits kicking in the same time as your third attack does, and same for the monsters, getting up into that range and more is a big deal for damage and also everything else, which means fighting a monster just a few levels above yourself doubles their damage (and other effects) and halves yours, while fighting down works the opposite, halves theirs and doubles yours.

So I keep looking for something to Voltron into a +5 to hit, or save AC, and there's just no flexibility at all, it's an immense thing and at max level you always have +5 item and +3 proficiency and the monsters expect you to have it so it doesn't even do anything. I think the +2 from the shield is probably a really good idea against big solos, and a total waste against mooks. Getting a decent DR from it turns out to be hard, the materials get expensive for a one-off.

They might be right that you can't really build a bad character, it'd be terrible to miss that +3 proficiency so it's just built into all the classes, and they tell you repeatedly to get the item bonuses, and maybe there's +2 circumstance and +2 condition? Which seems OK, but the actions other people burn to give them to you, I don't think it adds up.


Are Wizards doing anything? I can't tell from the spells, there's a bit of useful stuff for running away and hiding, there's some auto-kills at level 10, most of the rest seems really weak, damage is pretty sad, worse than PF1.
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Post by Username17 »

Skill systems are hard. And skill systems in level based systems are really hard. There's several issues you need to work with:
  • Many tasks, like dispensing sagacious wisdom about the habitats of black dragons or whatever, are not and should not be associated with any particular power level. Meeting The Mentor is part of Act I of the Hero's Journey, and it remains Act I regardless of the level or the stakes involved. Superman still needs to gather information sometimes, and he talks to scientists and dock workers who are much lower level than he is.
  • Many tasks, like sneaking up on demons or climbing the walls of evil fortresses are tasks that characters need to succeed at when they come up because otherwise the game doesn't advance. Sometimes this could be about succeeding at "level appropriate" challenges, but the truth is that many of these "out of combat" challenges are not actually against level appropriate things. Player characters are supposed to hide from Ring Wraiths and Smaug - but those monsters are also much higher level than the player characters. That is why they are supposed to hide!
  • It is an endless well of feel bads for a high level character to do their thing and get overshadowed by Mook #4. On the flip side, it is also dumb as fuck to ask the Barbarian to solve architecture problems because he's high enough level and has a decent chance of figuring it out rather than one of the siege engineer minions you have.
All in all, this is not an easy problem. There are no easy answers and a lot of potential blind alleyways in game design. Added to this is the issue that 3rd edition is the best edition and its skill system actually works real well for like 3 levels and then completely falls apart. So it's tempting to think you could patch 3e's skill system to work at the rest of the levels and have something good enough for the whole game. But that's wrong.

So I can see how you could end up with "level bonus to all skills, skill mastery rank adds functionally trivial bonus but also gates new skill uses" but that's bad. It can't work out the way you want it to, because that's a bad system.

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Post by Slade »

So bards get inspire courage as a 1 act at will, but you can get Lingering performance to double if not triple the duration...

The issue is the DC suggested to activate Lingering is High DC (14 at 1st). Meaning you only have a 50% chance to succeed (you have to do a performance check, assuming Cha 16 and +1 level). And it costs 1 spell point each time to do it.

I understand free stacking +1 hit/dam/fear save is powerful for PF 2, but why High save why not Medium save (something reasonable to do).
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Post by tussock »

+1/+1 in PF2 is about +30% damage output at 1st level, for the whole party, it's a single action, just do it every turn.

Inspire Heorics for +2/+2 at level 7 for 1SP should be about +50% damage still for one action, which if you could just make it last trivially would be ... well, you either have that or your whole party sucks.

Little mass bonuses for 1 action like that are probably what wins PF2, stack in on circumstance bonuses and/or penalties to AC on foes. It's just the curve on getting better attacks and better crits and getting the 3rd attack working at all is super productive.
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Post by Username17 »

The insistence on making everything gain an effect level every +10 on the result means that you never leave the range where a +1 bonus has a large relative impact. By the time you're regular hitting on 10 numbers, you are critical hitting on 1 number. So while +1 doesn't add any damage output from your regular hits, it adds +100% to the output of your critical hits. And while a critical hit is less than 10 regular hits, it's a lot more than 1. Every bonus adds 1:1 to the chances of getting the highest tier possible result and removes 1:1 from the chances of getting the lowest tier possible result. If you hit on an 11+, you fumble on a 1 and critical on zero numbers, and if you add +1 to that you critical on a 20 and fumble on zero numbers. You've basically blanked out the number that made you stab yourself and replaced it with a number where you hit your opponent twice.

That paradigm means that every +1 is incredibly valuable. As much if not more so than it was in 4e. As such, expect the PF2 player community (to the extent that it exists) to be into micromanagement and bonus whoring to the same degree that the 4e community was.

Weird shit like Inspire Courage is going to stay on everyone's radar. And the only reason it won't become an assumed part of every party is if it turns out that there's something more efficient to do to give everyone stackable small bonuses.

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Post by Axebird »

The difference tiny bonuses to hit in this system make can't be understated. Going from hitting on a 10 to hitting on a 7 boosts your average damage output (if you attack for a bunch of rounds) by about 50%. You're absolutely right people are going to be hunting for the best way to abuse that.

Right now it's looking like that thing is going to be Heroism. It lasts 10 minutes instead of 1 minute like most buffs, and gives a +1 conditional bonus to attack, perception, saves, and skill checks. +2 at spell level 5, and +3 at spell level 8. So your party loads up on as much Heroism juice as they can, then retreats and takes a nap when they run out.

Bonus types have been consolidated super hard, by the way. Everything is either Circumstance (tactical state or constant class feature), Conditional (not in the sense of a synonym for circumstancial, but 'as a result of a game condition' for some bizarre reason), or Item (magic swag). Penalties are typed as one of those three things too, and don't stack, so there's no point in entangling, grappling, flanking, and surprising an opponent, they're still just at -2 AC. Bonuses/penalties also have a hard limit ranging from -4 to +4, except for item bonuses that go up to +5 probably because it fit the weird leveled skill DC chart:

Image
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Slade wrote:So bards get inspire courage as a 1 act at will, but you can get Lingering performance to double if not triple the duration...

The issue is the DC suggested to activate Lingering is High DC (14 at 1st). Meaning you only have a 50% chance to succeed (you have to do a performance check, assuming Cha 16 and +1 level). And it costs 1 spell point each time to do it.

I understand free stacking +1 hit/dam/fear save is powerful for PF 2, but why High save why not Medium save (something reasonable to do).
Note: the DC increases each level for no reason. At level 2, you're using the same composition giving the same +1 bonus to the same target, but the DC increases by 1 because fuck you.

I don't know why they hide this behind a skill check when it's a DC 11 flat check.
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Post by Username17 »

Just so we're clear, the proposed PF2 RNG is an abomination. To understand why, consider the design purpose of the Take 10 rule.

On a d20 the size of a bonus required to take something from "fails often, appropriate for a character who isn't supposed to have any mastery of the subject" to "hardly ever fails, appropriate for a character with a fair mastery of the subject" is like +/-10, right? You can't add those kinds of bonuses twice and stay on the RNG. A bonus capable of giving you the kind of standard deviations required to make something feel likely or unlikely is like a fucking huge number on a flat RNG and can't be repeated easily because the RNG breaks.

And that's where Take 10 comes in. By giving you the ability to succeed at tasks reliably just by getting to the middle of the RNG rather than the end, the bonuses required to take people from unskilled to skilled don't have to be nearly as large, and therefore you're able to hand out those bonuses more times without breaking the RNG.

Which brings us to... this fucking thing. So when each +1 moves the success down 5% on the RNG and also converts normal success to critical success on 5% of the RNG, you've created a situation where bonuses are hyper valuable and small numbers of them are easy to see. Each +1 makes a difference 10% of the time because it can either create success from failure or create critical success from normal success. But here's the thing: it still only reduces failure by 5%. Getting a bonus that's large enough to be very obvious still leaves you with an unacceptably high failure chance for a character who isn't supposed to be a figure of ridicule.

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Post by Axebird »

Oh yeah, Take 10 and Take 20 have been removed. The replacement is... well, here:

Image

You get a Skill Feat at every even level. You can improve proficiency in a skill at every odd level (unless you're a rogue, in which case you can improve a skill at every level). You can go from Expert to Master at 7th level, and Master to Legendary at 15th level. You can only be a Master or Legendary in Signature skills, which are defined by your class. All in all, you can only have level appropriate proficiency in 1-3 skills after level 2, if you're anyone other than a rogue.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

I can't believe class skills are still a thing in 2018.

If a warrior wants to be sneaky, let him. If a ranger wants to learn knowledge [arcana] so he can hunt wizards, let him. There may be skills that are frequently associated with particular classes and infrequently associated with a particular class, but that can come about organically because usually a skill will or won't fit what that character is about. But as soon as you go just a little outside the lines, the game shouldn't break. Most Rangers might hunt giants or dragons, but if you're hunting necromancers, you should be able to get the tools to do that job.
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Post by Username17 »

Having to spend a feat, or really any resources on Take 10 is bullshit. It's an accounting trick to speed up the game and make the characters less ridiculously incompetent than what flat RNGs normally produce.
Take 15 is a whole different ballgame, as it amounts to a +4 bonus, which as we've mentioned in this system of critical successes based on check result is a really fucking big deal. Take 20 and Take 30 are simply off the RNG altogether, raising the question of why you're going to all this trouble to limit bonus inflation. Legendary Skill is only equivalent to fucking Skill Focus in 3rd edition, but once you have that, the Assurance feat is a +19 bonus, which is more than the entire everything else of the game.

I just don't even know how to process this. Having people get the ability to declare their die result to be a number higher than 20 completely invalidates having the purpose of having a d20 as your RNG in the first place.

In a broader sense, declaring your base die to be a 15 doesn't work the way they think it does. What it does is act as a bonus whenever you were going to take 10. So when you would have taken ten, you get +5, which is a large bonus on the d20 all the time and even bigger in this system. But that bonus goes away when taking 10 isn't enough. It means that if you need to roll for whatever reason, you only get better than your "not trying" number one attempt in 4. It means that if the DM produces a challenge that the player can't automatically bypass, they fail that challenge a super majority of the time.

The people pushing this idea don't seem to understand or care how fucking disempowering this all is. Characters are going to be failing at tasks in their wheelhouse. A lot.

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Post by GâtFromKI »

FrankTrollman wrote:Take 15 is a whole different ballgame, as it amounts to a +4 bonus, which as we've mentioned in this system of critical successes based on check result is a really fucking big deal. Take 20 and Take 30 are simply off the RNG altogether, raising the question of why you're going to all this trouble to limit bonus inflation. Legendary Skill is only equivalent to fucking Skill Focus in 3rd edition, but once you have that, the Assurance feat is a +19 bonus, which is more than the entire everything else of the game.

I just don't even know how to process this. Having people get the ability to declare their die result to be a number higher than 20 completely invalidates having the purpose of having a d20 as your RNG in the first place.
Assurance doesn't give a result of 10/15/20/30 on the die, it gives you a total result of 10/15/20/30.

So you're level 7, you're a master at basketweaving with a +13 bonus (+7 level +2 master +4 dex), with the assurance feat your result is 20, as if you rolled a 7 on the die.

Note: at level 7, the only level-appropriate DC you attains with a 20 is for an easy task. At level 11, a DC 20 is "trivial"; in the rule this means "don't roil, it's an autosuccess". So Assurance does litterally nothing from level 11 to 14. It does nothing at level 1 and at level 6 as well.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Right. Treating your total result as 30 is bad half the time if you have a +20 bonus. It's also really disassociated. If one person has a +25 and knew has a +15, it seems really strange that they both can consistently hit DC 30. Of course, I don't understand what gives you bonuses to know if both people could qualify with those bonuses.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 »

Yeah... Oh wow. I just assumed they meant die result, because that is how Take 10 works. Having it be your total result is just terrible. It appears to cut out your stat mod, so it's a feat that you'd only even consider on a skill your character would otherwise be bad at. Really only does anything for skills that define difficulty in terms of penalties (which the feat lets you ignore) rather than increased target numbers (which would always fail with that feat).

Essentially we're at "fail train" here. Characters in this system will fail. Constantly. On tasks that are supposedly in their areas of expertise. I hope they are going for a really light hearted and cartoonish tone, because otherwise failure rates like that would be way too high.

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Axebird
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Post by Axebird »

"Checks seem really swingy and specialists kinda suck at their jobs" seem to be recurring themes in feedback so far.

I don't know how they thought that level-based DC chart was a good idea. There are inklings of the idea that most tasks shouldn't have higher level equivalents, but instead of just defining those tasks with DCs they built that abomination and included the advice "If you’re not sure how difficult something significant should be, use a high-difficulty DC for the party’s level." So you're back in 4e territory where you can kinda-sorta get the idea the designers know a wall shouldn't get harder to climb when a higher level character is trying to climb it, but the actual advice the book gives you is "Fuck it, it does."
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