Skills & Feats From PATHFINDER UNCHAINED

Pathfinder Unchained is imminent, and Paizo designer Mark Seifter has just provided a new look at the book - this time focusing on skills and feats. He mentions three skill variants- background, consolidated, and grouped skills. He also describes a variant multiclasing system and mentions that every combat feat gets new powers using Stamina, a new resource. It certainly sounds like some of these variant rules drive right to the core of the game! "Stamina is a new resource that allows martial characters to boost themselves and use their feats in new and exciting ways. It regenerates relatively quickly between battles, allowing you to enjoy an entirely new mindset to your daily exploration; a party of stamina-users benefits from hit and run guerilla tactics, emphasizing the value of mobility, stealth, and timing (as opposed to the mindset of "buff, buff, buff, speed through!")"

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[Kramodlog]

That's still there if the armor gives you DR.

How can it change automatically if you do not do anything to the armor?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This book was never for you then. A-it's a new hardcover, so it's a whole book of additional content. B-it's a book about options for various subsystems.

Armor as DR & defense were done in Ultimate Combat.

I thought it was going to be like Unearthed Arcana. And it does have some of the system mechanic changes like I would hope - with the skill systems - but I just hoped there would be more of that and less giant charts to memorize.

And the DR/defense system in Ultimate Combat was a joke. It was offensively bad. This could have been their chance to apologize for it.

 

[Azgulor]

And the DR/defense system in Ultimate Combat was a joke.

Can't argue with that at all, sadly.

 

[neobolts]

I thought it was going to be like Unearthed Arcana. And it does have some of the system mechanic changes like I would hope - with the skill systems - but I just hoped there would be more of that and less giant charts to memorize.

I'm confused as well. I'm not in a PF campaign at the moment, so I'm not following as closely as I would if I was. I thought this book was partly about class balance, but mainly about gameplay options for streamlining and accelerating play. This sounds like an addtional layer of complexity. That's not a bad thing, more options are PF's bag. Just not sure what the theme of this book is.

 

[SteveC]

For what it's worth, these changes sound awesome to me. I don't play Pathfinder because it's largely 3X, which I've given up for a long time. I like the sounds of what they're doing here very much and I'll probably pick the book up.

Since I'm a 4E and 13th Age fan, this may mean they're going in exactly the wrong direction, but time will tell.

 

[Kramodlog]

I'm confused as well. I'm not in a PF campaign at the moment, so I'm not following as closely as I would if I was. I thought this book was partly about class balance, but mainly about gameplay options for streamlining and accelerating play. This sounds like an addtional layer of complexity. That's not a bad thing, more options are PF's bag. Just not sure what the theme of this book is.

Options. The theme is options. This is just one of them.

 

[neobolts]

Options. The theme is options. This is just one of them.

That's a little less focused than I was expecting. Sounds like concepts that didn't fit into another product. I suppose you could have said the theme was "RPG stuff" or "book with rules".

 

[Kramodlog]

That's a little less focused than I was expecting. Sounds like concepts that didn't fit into another product. I suppose you could have said the theme was "RPG stuff" or "book with rules".

PF Unchained is like 3.5's Unearthed Arcana. A book full of options and variant rules for the sake of options. It is a way to refresh a game, have fun by trying new things.

 

[casterblaster]

Whatever you want to call it, this is a test bed for a future edition no matter how much anyone wants to deny it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Whatever you want to call it, this is a test bed for a future edition no matter how much anyone wants to deny it.

Interesting assertion. Was there anything introduced in 3.5 Unearthed Arcana, which later became a core part of 4E? If I recall, most of the innovative concepts there were in the otherwise-innocuous Book of Nine Swords.