Pathfinder 2E Pathfinder 2E or Pathfinder 1E?

CapnZapp said:

5E every much still got Squishies; there's a huge life expectancy discrepancy between a clothie with middling AC and no Con bonus, and someone with 20+ AC and twice as many hp.

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I'm not convinced that clothies with no Con bonus are a thing that exist in 5E. In the last game I played, the average Con score at the end of the campaign was around 18. As long as everyone focused on offense, you really could just charge into the fray and kill them before they killed you, and you'd always come out on top. Due to the action economy, no BBEG is really capable of dealing damage quickly enough to win that exchange.

CapnZapp said:

Remember, we're discussing this in the context of "too high" AC. You want characters that focus on defense to get great AC but not stratospheric AC.

This probably needs a diminishing returns mechanism. Each extra bonus yields less and less. Just adding +1 after +1 (and certainly not +2s) simply won't work.

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In particular, 5E doesn't allow for stratospheric AC; you can get reliable AC against minions, but bosses will always have at least a 30% chance to hit you, so you can't just stand there forever. The diminishing return is on the effort; you have to work much harder to get your AC from 26 to 27, than you do to get it from 23 to 24, and it doesn't help you at all against anything that would already need a 20 to hit you. Pathfinder 1E is much the same, but increase the AC numbers by +10, and the boss's attack bonus by +20. In Pathfinder, if you don't throw absolutely everything you have into AC, such that normal minions need a natural 20 to hit, then the high-level boss monsters will only miss you on a 1.

On a side note, because AC in these games works as avoidance rather than mitigation, having a high AC can significantly reduce your ability to redirect attacks away from your allies. The enemy isn't going to keep swinging at you, if they roll an 18 and miss. It's not really a huge deal in either game, since enemies who miss on an 18 are also dead by round 3, but it's kind of annoying.

CapnZapp said:

This probably needs a diminishing returns mechanism. Each extra bonus yields less and less. Just adding +1 after +1 (and certainly not +2s) simply won't work.

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AC is a bit weird, because it actually has accelerating returns. Each additional plus gives you more life expectancy than the one before.

For example, let's say we have two characters in a party. One AC 15, and the other AC 21. You're fighting monsters with attack bonus +4. So they hit the first guy 50% of the time, and the second guy 20% of the time.

Now let's add a cleric who can cast shield of faith on one of these characters for +2 AC. If she casts it on the guy with AC 15, he is now hit 40% of the time instead. That reduces the damage he takes by 20%. But if she casts it on the AC 21 dude, he is now only hit 10% of the time - that's a damage reduction of 50%, so shield of faith is more than twice as effective on him.

That's the problem with tanks in a game like D&D - the range between hard to hit and nigh-impossible to hit is very thin.

Saelorn said:

In Pathfinder, if you don't throw absolutely everything you have into AC, such that normal minions need a natural 20 to hit, then the high-level boss monsters will only miss you on a 1.

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I believe having a high hit rate even against a reasonably high AC is intended in 3e/PF. The intent is that yes, you will be hit, but a high AC will prevent secondary attacks from connecting, and also prevent the opponent from dumping all their attack bonus into Power Attack and going to town on you. Pathfinder made Power Attack an either/or thing that scaled with level/BAB, rather than a sliding scale you could manipulate based on the situation, so that particular issue didn't work like it did in 3e.

Staffan said:

I believe having a high hit rate even against a reasonably high AC is intended in 3e/PF. The intent is that yes, you will be hit, but a high AC will prevent secondary attacks from connecting, and also prevent the opponent from dumping all their attack bonus into Power Attack and going to town on you.

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That's a good point. I guess that makes sense, from a mechanical perspective, but I still don't find "You'll only get stabbed once per six seconds, rather than twice," to be a persuasive argument from an in-character perspective.

If our best plan is to send me out to distract the enemy, since I'll get stabbed less than anyone else, then I'm still going to advocate for any other plan first.

So the first play session got posted on yootoob. Anyone watch?

Some fun roleplay. Not sure anything struck me as "woah....that' surprising". It seemed to hold well with what I recall from the playtest rulebook.

Saelorn said:

I think the AC numbers in 5E are actually in a pretty interesting place, as long as you open up the possibility of magic items. You can reach a reliable AC against lower-level enemies (which you should still be facing, when you get to high levels), and it's up to the player to decide how much of their offense they want to sacrifice to achieve that.

The real problem is that there's no point to tanking, because everyone has enough HP to survive a fight, and everyone regenerates to full between fights. There is no "squishy DPS" that you actually need to protect, for which you would want to trade your offense.

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You don't actually "regenerate to full [HP] between fights." You still have to spend resources (spells, potions, wand charges, or spending from your pool of Hit Dice) during a short rest to recover any HP. This takes an hour, which isn't always available anyway.

You do get full HP on a long rest (of 8 hours, limited to once per day), but you don't recover all your Hit Dice.

Retreater said:

You don't actually "regenerate to full [HP] between fights." You still have to spend resources (spells, potions, wand charges, or spending from your pool of Hit Dice) during a short rest to recover any HP. This takes an hour, which isn't always available anyway.

You do get full HP on a long rest (of 8 hours, limited to once per day), but you don't recover all your Hit Dice.

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Barring extreme situations which are unlikely to occur during play, characters will have recovered to full before the next fight begins. In 5E, you either use healing magic, or you make the time to rest. In Pathfinder, you probably have a wand. In neither case does anyone carry over significant damage between encounters. Theoretical exceptions (not enough time to rest, not enough charges in the wand) remain largely theoretical. Such have been my years of experience with both systems.

A resource that never approaches its limit is, for all practical purposes, not a limited resource. Unless you're running 6+ encounters on consecutive days, nobody is in danger of running out of Hit Dice. Unless you've overhauled the wealth/crafting rules entirely, the party will never run out of wand charges. For all practical purposes, characters regenerate to full HP between fights, and that's a feature of both games unless you do something to change it.

Saelorn said:

Barring extreme situations which are unlikely to occur during play, characters will have recovered to full before the next fight begins. In 5E, you either use healing magic, or you make the time to rest. In Pathfinder, you probably have a wand. In neither case does anyone carry over significant damage between encounters. Theoretical exceptions (not enough time to rest, not enough charges in the wand) remain largely theoretical. Such have been my years of experience with both systems.

A resource that never approaches its limit is, for all practical purposes, not a limited resource. Unless you're running 6+ encounters on consecutive days, nobody is in danger of running out of Hit Dice. Unless you've overhauled the wealth/crafting rules entirely, the party will never run out of wand charges. For all practical purposes, characters regenerate to full HP between fights, and that's a feature of both games unless you do something to change it.

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They may have full HP at the start of a battle, but they will certainly not have all their spell slots (due to casting spells) or Hit Dice (due to spending them during rests). Just because everyone is at near full HP doesn't mean that the party is at completely full strength and at maximum resources.

I don't run a lot of 5E these days, as we're mostly playing 4E, but I can say that my characters are usually taxed by the time they're able to take a long rest: very little healing left or daily powers (the equivalent of spell slots in 5E).

I did run some 2nd edition AD&D this past weekend, and if you'd prefer that healing mechanic experience, you can be my guest. Haha. ("I'm down 7 HP - out of 9 HP - so I need to leave the dungeon, have 7 complete days of bed rest before I can return on the adventure.")

Retreater said:

They may have full HP at the start of a battle, but they will certainly not have all their spell slots (due to casting spells) or Hit Dice (due to spending them during rests). Just because everyone is at near full HP doesn't mean that the party is at completely full strength and at maximum resources.

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If you can get through an encounter with spending only HP, and you don't spend any limited resources to recover those HP, then you can continue indefinitely without fear. I've never been on board with the idea that you should be spending spell slots in every encounter, anyway. The wizard's primary job is to know when to not cast a spell, and only spend a slot when they would lose more by not doing so. That is to say, if you're near full HP, then you can handle anything in your way, and that's as strong as you need to be.

Retreater said:

I don't run a lot of 5E these days, as we're mostly playing 4E, but I can say that my characters are usually taxed by the time they're able to take a long rest: very little healing left or daily powers (the equivalent of spell slots in 5E).

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Fourth Edition is a vastly different game from either Pathfinder or 5E, when it comes to resource management. I don't know that your experience there translates very well between editions.

Retreater said:

I did run some 2nd edition AD&D this past weekend, and if you'd prefer that healing mechanic experience, you can be my guest. Haha. ("I'm down 7 HP - out of 9 HP - so I need to leave the dungeon, have 7 complete days of bed rest before I can return on the adventure.")

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Have you read my book? Of course, the AC mechanics which I use are designed to facilitate slower healing. If you've taken 7hp of damage, then something has gone very wrong, but 9hp should be more than a sufficient buffer for your mistakes. If you can only afford to rest for 1-2 days, then it's fine that you aren't at full, because you can probably avoid taking damage if you play more cautiously.

If you tried to use AD&D healing rules in a 5E game, without adjusting any of the rest of the math, it wouldn't go well. The core assumption of 5E is that everyone will constantly take damage, which is why they had to make healing so trivial.

chunkosauruswrex said:

5e characters make almost 0 decisions after 3rd level

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This appears to be true, but it is misleading.

The PF character makes "choices" at every level... but in reality these choices were made by the player a long time ago at character creation. To be an effective PF character, you must character build with several levels in advance.

You don't choose every time you level up, you have already chosen .