Pathfinder 1E Broken Rules in Pathfinder

I posted the below elsewhere, and would like to ask what rules that players still find broken in Pathfinder.

Hereticus said:

AD&D through 3.5ed had many broken things in them, and I miss that.

Nobody ever tells a favorite story that praises balance, most of our favorite stories are about what we did by taking advantage of something that was broken in the rules.

But to be honest, for me Pathfinder is an improvement on 3.5ed, and I like the system very much even finding those 'broken rules' is much tougher.

I did not like 4.0ed, and IMVHO 5.0ed is even worse.

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For me, I picked the Improved Familiar feat (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/improved-familiar), and from this list (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/elemental) I chose a small positive energy elemental (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/mo...rgy-tohc/positive-energy-elemental-small-tohc). It can cure me 1d4 per round, at-will by touch, and can give me temporary hit points.

Caravan rules?

It's tricky.
Pathfinder has some pretty soft balance compared to later games like 4e, 5e, 13th Age, and the like. Nothing too bad in the Core Rules beyond the caster/martial disparity. There's a lot of small feats spread throughout the like that fix those problems. But the content in the first couple books isn't really broken.
(Apart from the summoner, which is broke as eff.)

Really, the most broken thing in Pathfinder is hands down the amount of Pathfinder. Option creep = power creep, and there is a LOT of options in Pathfinder. The power disparity between the baseline and what someone can build with enough time is staggering. The correct combination of options can do hilarious things in the game.

I don't entirely agree with the OP though. It's less "broken" things that are memorable, so much as things not going as exepected. When everything works as intenteded. Because no one remembers a textbook encounter.
Broken rules can have that effect, but so can a Total Party Madness, or the wand of wonder, or a ridiculous string of rolls, or an unexpected role playing reaction to events, an ingenious plan, or even a plan going spectacularly off the rails.

None of that is dependant on the rules, though. You can do that in any game system.
Imbalance can help as a crutch, providing a way to force a non-textbook encounter via the rules. But that only works once, and the it ceases to be special. When you grapple the bad guy with a house using an animate building spell it's hilarious that one time, but then it becomes the norm.
So the best way to be unpredictable is to never do the same crazy thing twice.

Hereticus said:

I posted the below elsewhere, and would like to ask what rules that players still find broken in Pathfinder.



For me, I picked the Improved Familiar feat (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/improved-familiar), and from this list (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/elemental) I chose a small positive energy elemental (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/mo...rgy-tohc/positive-energy-elemental-small-tohc). It can cure me 1d4 per round, at-will by touch, and can give me temporary hit points.

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The positive energy elemental is from the Tome of Horrors Complete — a third-party product.

Saying Pathfinder has "broken rules" and using third-party content as an example is pretty silly, I think. Do you disagree? (Would you hold Wizards of the Coast responsible for every third-party supplement anyone's ever published for D&D?)

I've never had a problem with "power creep". I am not alone in wanting options, but the more options that become available, the more power creep comes into existence. Its a problem for those people that feel the need that every game needs to be inclusive of every rule, though nothing necessarily wrong with wanting all the rules in play. For me options means, including what best fits within a given game theme, choosing which options best to include, while also having the choice to optionally exclude that which to me as GM does not fit the current theme. For those playing in Pathfinder Society, while that aspect of PF has it's own built in restrictions, it's meant to be inclusive of every published Pathfinder product, and a reliance on the Golarian setting. I don't play PFS and I never play in Golarian - so neither of those attract me. I never allow all the rules in every game. I state prior to a given campaign arc, which books are allowed, say perhaps: the Core, the APG, UC, and UM. Because I'm a small 3PP, and I do freelance work for other 3PP, I will often allow certain 3PP products to fit in a given campaign arc. Because I never allow every rule, I never get overwhelmed with the "power creep" that exists.

I will say, I like the recent article on Game Informer about the upcoming Starfinder RPG. While based on Pathfinder, they've changed the math behind many weapon attacks, and in some cases threw away parts of Pathfinder that don't really fit in the chosen direction of the new game. It's supposed to be very lean in comparison to Pathfinder, which I consider a good way to go. And perhaps if Paizo ever chose to attempt a Pathfinder 2.0, maybe that would be a good test bed for development, as was put in place with Starfinder. (Here's a link to that Game Informer article if it interests you.)

That was a fantastic and very detailed interview. I had pretty much lost interest in SF, despite my excitement at the announcement due to the worry it might be nearly as heavy as PF and just stuck in space. But the details about the universe/worlds and attitude toward to rules is refreshing.

Thanks for the link [MENTION=50895]gamerprinter[/MENTION]

Hereticus said:

I posted the below elsewhere, and would like to ask what rules that players still find broken in Pathfinder.



For me, I picked the Improved Familiar feat (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/improved-familiar), and from this list (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/elemental) I chose a small positive energy elemental (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/mo...rgy-tohc/positive-energy-elemental-small-tohc). It can cure me 1d4 per round, at-will by touch, and can give me temporary hit points.

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Only works if the elemental hits you with a slam attack or if it is killed and explodes. No DM (my opinion) is gonna allow a character to repeatedly summon a familiar and then either kill it or have it attack the summoner. Even if it's "legal" by the rules, I'd have the higher up positive elementals get pissed off at the summoner and then appear and deal with the situation.

Grazzt said:

No DM (my opinion) is gonna allow a character to repeatedly summon a familiar and then either kill it or have it attack the summoner. Even if it's "legal" by the rules, I'd have the higher up positive elementals get pissed off at the summoner and then appear and deal with the situation.

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No DM with any amount of common sense would allow that, but no DM with any amount of common sense would allow third party material in the first place. If they were silly enough to allow the thing into the game, then it would be hypocritical for them to suggest that it doesn't work as advertised.

Saelorn said:

No DM with any amount of common sense would allow that, but no DM with any amount of common sense would allow third party material in the first place. If they were silly enough to allow the thing into the game, then it would be hypocritical for them to suggest that it doesn't work as advertised.

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There are plenty of sensible Pathfinder material being created by third party companies, and often are more balanced than many options published by Paizo Publishing. I don't consider everything published by Paizo as balanced, and while there can certainly be unbalanced third party material out there, most major third party companies realize the danger of adding unbalanced material (since that happened a lot during 3x days), and are more careful, so that their material is actually very balanced, even slightly nerfed to avoid the possibility of releasing unbalanced material. Also many third party publishers are the freelance writers and game designers producing AP material for Paizo publications. Many of the supplemental rules - caravan and romance rules included in Jade Regent were rather clumsy or unbalanced, that Legendary Games (who all write for Paizo) create aftermarket material to correct or improve supplemental rules (like caravan rules). Owen K. C. Stevens works at Paizo, but also publishes Rogue Genius, Rite Publishing and Green Ronin third party material - he creates rules for 1st and 3rd party.

I think it's completely unfair to accuse GMs that use third party material as doing something wrong or inappropriate, when those same game designers do work for canon Paizo material as well. I agree with the issue regarding elemental creatures and improved familiar by Frog God Games as creating something unbalanced, but I consider that a rare instance of a broken mechanic, not something that consistently occurs with third party material.

Consider that the Paizo haunt mechanic, for example, doesn't include appropriate Knowledge checks and DC checks to investigate a haunt in order to lay it to rest - it's not a part of the haunt stat block. However, when I publish new haunts for my products, I always add a Knowledge and DC check in the haunt stat block even though doing so is not official. However, you cannot easily lay a haunt to rest without that information.

gamerprinter said:

I think it's completely unfair to accuse GMs that use third party material as doing something wrong or inappropriate, when those same game designers do work for canon Paizo material as well. I agree with the issue regarding elemental creatures and improved familiar by Frog God Games as creating something unbalanced, but I consider that a rare instance of a broken mechanic, not something that consistently occurs with third party material.

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GMs should absolutely allow third party and homebrew material to their own games. They just shouldn't give anything a free pass because it's in a published book, or written by someone whose name they recognize. That's the point where common sense needs to assert itself. Everything - everything - should be scrutinized by the GM before it's allowed into a game. Whether it's first-party, third-party, or home-brew scrawled on a napkin, you need to look at it before you let it into your game. Even things that are fine in isolation might become broken in conjunction with other material or with house rules, and the only one who knows everything about the game being played is the GM of that game.

The positive energy elemental is an example of a poorly-designed monster, regardless of who wrote it. It shouldn't have been allowed at the table in the first place. Once it's there, though, the GM has to deal with their decision to let it into the game, and they have a couple of options on how to go about that. Saying that the higher-up elementals are going to come beat you up for exploiting a loophole is a bad way of doing that; it's highly adversarial and borderline meta-gaming (in that they only go after the PCs who do this, without regard to the NPCs who would obviously have done this a countless times before). Better solutions would be to fix the creature so that it's not actually broken (have it deal radiant damage, like a wisp, that does extra damage to undead but doesn't heal living creatures), or wholesale retcon it (that never happened, positive energy elementals don't exist, your memory is playing tricks on you).